Atomic III: Our New $260M Fund and Open Call to Future Founders

Come build with us

Wow, what a year. Twelve months ago, no one could have predicted the unprecedented and historic challenges we were about to face. The problems created, and opportunities to solve these problems, have accelerated at a rate we’ve never seen before.

This has been a stark reminder that we need to build the future we want together. I started Atomic to build this future by identifying some of the world’s big problems and building companies to help solve them. Our thesis was that we could scale entrepreneurship by assembling the right teams around the right problems and solve them faster and more effectively. And if we focused only on the best ideas — the truly transformational ones — we could fuel them with capital and resources to build multiple high-growth companies that could have an outsized impact.

That mission has never felt more urgent. But we can’t do it alone.

Today we are announcing our first ever open call for Future Founders to come build with us. Our goal is to expand access to entrepreneurship, especially to those outside of Silicon Valley and from underrepresented backgrounds. We believe entrepreneurship should be inclusive and the problems of our times are too important to ignore or limit to a particular geography or group. We encourage anyone and everyone to apply, and to consider entrepreneurship as a career path.

So how do you get involved? We’re accepting applications now; no need to pitch us with an idea — we want to hear about you. Read more here for details.

We are also grateful to share today that we have closed Atomic III, a $260 million fund exclusively focused on company building and backed by top institutional investors, endowments, and foundations across the world. This is the largest fund ever for a technology focused venture studio, a now popularized term for the model we pioneered for the technology industry in 2012. The model is scaling, we’ve built dozens of companies, and our first two funds are performing in the top decile of venture capital funds.

But the real story behind Atomic is the success of our amazing co-founders. Some people talk about the future; these are the people building it with us. Meet a few of them:

• Andrew Dudum and Hilary Coles co-founded Hims & Hers to create a digital front door to the healthcare system for consumers. In record time (just over three years), Hims & Hers went from launch to going public at a $3 billion valuation on the New York Stock Exchange.
• Nikki Pechet, CEO of Homebound, created a better way to build and rebuild homes after living through the wildfires in Northern California. Homebound was recently named one of Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups.
• Gadi Shamia, a 20-year enterprise software veteran, and Benjamin Gleitzman, technologist and AI expert, teamed up with us to build Replicant, the world’s first autonomous call center. Replicant raised a $27M series A after growing 15X during the first six months of the pandemic.

We’re partnering with dozens of other founders to address key problems in areas like education, entertainment, financial services, housing, healthcare, the enterprise, and many others.

As our companies have scaled, so have we. We’ve tripled the size of our team since our previous fund. JD Ross, who co-founded Opendoor when he was 24, joined as our newest General Partner. Healey Cypher, who was my right-hand executive at my first startup and most recently sold his company to Verifone, joined as our COO. We also promoted Jordan Kong to Principal, well-deserved as she has brought a strong blend of investing (from IVP) and founding experience that has been hugely valuable to our portfolio. When you build with Atomic, you’re co-founding a company with four partners who have created billion dollar companies and a team of over thirty operators and specialists across key functions including design, engineering, marketing, legal, finance, HR, and recruiting, working hand-in-hand with our co-founders to scale our companies.

We’ve started twelve companies in the past twelve months, an exciting pace that surpasses any other point in Atomic’s history. With the world beginning to recover and rebuild, it is time for us to build the next great companies. And entrepreneurs with diverse and global perspectives play a more important role than ever.

There has never been a better time in history to start a company. Come build with us.

With gratitude,

Jack & the Atomic Team