It’s also the natural next step in over a decade of collaboration between its co-founders, Jessica Verrilli and April Underwood.
What We Do
We invest in early stage companies, typically from pre-seed through Series A. From idea through product-market fit and beyond, we back founders who bring an insight about a market, an audience, or problem space and a drive to fully realize their vision on the largest possible scale. We support those founders with our own hard earned experience and access to an exceptional network of leaders and builders across the industry.
Our History
Jess and April first met at Twitter, where they played key roles scaling the business from early-stage startup (Jess was employee #34 and April joined at #150) to public company and beyond. April built and led product and partnerships teams, and Jess built the corporate development function, acquiring 30 companies and meeting with early-stage founders every day. After her time at Twitter, April joined Slack at 150 employees to lead product and platform as its first Chief Product Officer through 10X growth in employees, revenue, and customers. Jessica joined Google Ventures (GV) as a General Partner where she invested across stages for over 4 years. You can read more about each of their backgrounds here.
Along the way, in 2015, Jess and April along with four Twitter colleagues co-founded #ANGELS, an angel investing collective which has gone on to serve as a model for other alumni syndicates from companies around the world. Between the two of them, Jess and April backed 75 companies, and through #ANGELS built a distinguished community of operators and founders through dozens of events, a podcast, and a network of relationships across the venture capital landscape.
In 2023, Jess and April teamed up to build Adverb Ventures, a new venture capital firm backing early stage startups with hyper-growth ambitions. Adverb invests in exceptional founders who seek to redefine existing categories or create new ones. Jess and April closed the inaugural Fund 1 in the first half of the year and are both full time actively investing and building Adverb.
What's in a Name?
Through our many years working for and with founders building breakout companies, we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not just what you’re building that matters but also how you choose to build it. There are a lot of ways to build great businesses, and strategic choices to make at every step along the way. Ultimately, the adverbs matter as much as the verbs.
And of course, that adage is true for investors too. Our job is to pick the right founders and opportunities and to tilt the odds of success in their favor. Our mission is to be the investor who helps our founders navigate the most crucial moments of building their business, showing up both substantively and empathetically.