Athera Venture Partners

We’re early-stage company builders. We’ve founded 10+ companies and invested early in startups now worth over $50B. We’ve been in your shoes, we have the scars from being founders ourselves, and we know it takes incredible effort and determination to transform an idea into a category-defining company. We roll up our sleeves and provide hands-on support to our founders, which leads to big results. Our track record speaks for itself: in just 9 years, we have seeded 7 companies currently valued over $1B and 3 public companies. Pre-seed We lead pre-seed rounds. Our pre-seed companies participate in PearX, an early-stage bootcamp for founders with high potential ideas. We help founders build the right product, find the right market, and lay the foundations for a scalable venture company. We have been leading pre-seed rounds for the last 10 years and we believe a small-cohort, 14-week program is the most efficient way to start building a company. We customize PearX for every company and adjust it to their needs. For this reason, we are very selective with our pre-seed investments (less than 1% acceptance rate, 15 companies per cohort). How we help at pre-seed Pear partners with you at every step of your journey. Pick the right market: Picking the right market is critical. We help you size your market and thoroughly understand it. You will avoid markets that are too small and prepare to take on markets that have foiled many others. Understand your customer: The best companies are built on deep and differentiated customer insight. Our companies go through a rigorous customer development process to discover promising customer personas and needs. Once you internalize your customer’s problems as if they were your own, you can start solving them. Define your product: Based on your customer insights, we help you iterate on the minimum viable product that tests your market. Ship fast, learn quickly, and gradually discover where to double-down. Iterate iterate iterate: We’re not afraid to make multiple iterations and pivot until we get things right. You can count on us to be honest with you whether the data supports your thesis or we should adjust the product. Prove your product-market-fit: We help you define and hit the milestones needed to raise more capital. Not all traction is equally valuable, though. First, we focus on making sure your customers love your product; only then do we work on finding more customers. Build your team: Your team is your biggest asset. We are here to help you identify gaps, set up a polished recruiting process or conduct interviews – all to ensure you’re bringing on the best. Fundraise: We take an all hands on deck approach to make sure you can raise capital. We help you define your story, put together your deck, and pitch the right investor. We run a demo day twice a year that is attended by over one thousand investors. Use our network: Whether it is a customer, a partner, an investor or another founder, we help you get the introductions to the people that matter most for your business. How PearX works Phase 1: Idea development - WEEKS 1-4 Customer development Strategic market positioning Big company story development Defining key team needs Defining key KPIs for the program Phase 2: Execution - WEEKS 5-10 Build initial MVP Get early customer traction and data Go-to-market experimentation and development Iterate until you get it right Phase 3: Demo Day prep - WEEKS 11-14 Demo day/fundraising preparation Develop the pitch and iterate on the Demo Day deck Create fundraising strategy Phase 4: Demo Day and fundraising - DEMO DAY Pitch to 1,000 investors Help you vet term sheets, negotiate the best terms, and close your seed round Seed We lead and co-lead seed stage investments. Then we roll up our sleeves to get you to Series A. We help founders in four key areas: product-market fit, go-to-market, recruiting, and fundraising. How we help our seed founders Make your first hires: The best use of your capital is to hire the best team. We help in a unique way – our exceptional in-house recruiters partners with you, at no cost, to close your first engineering and technical hires. Before Pear, that team recruited thousands of engineers at Instacart, Uber, and Meta. Grow exponentially: Each company has a unique go-to-market strategy and seed is when you design your scalable growth engine. We iterate with you to test organic growth, paid growth, channel partnerships, sales org development and other models to hone on the right model for you. Sell effectively: We run a “Sales Bootcamp” to improve your sales skills, share how to run a sales organization, and help you iterate on your sales pitch and messaging. We also work our extensive networks to provide customer introductions. Retain your customers: Success is not only about acquiring customers. Retaining and expanding existing customers is ultimately even more important to your company’s success. We work with you to optimize the value of each customer over time. Achieve operational excellence: Great companies out-execute. While vision and innovation are critical, running your company like a machine is how you win. We help you define operating plans, run effective board meetings, clarify the KPIs needed for your next round, and focus on culture and personal development. Raise your Series A: We help you set your Series A fundraising strategy from day one. When the time to start fundraising comes, we run a “pitch deck clinic“ to build your story, gather your evidence, review your deck, design it, and master public speaking. Then, we work with you to get the right VC introductions, and, finally, we coach you through the negotiations. Our rigorous process produces results with over 70% of our seed companies raising series A’s from tier-1 institutions. Access to PearX programming: As a Pear portfolio company, you have the option to join the PearX program. This is a great way to come up to speed quickly on the ins and outs of starting and running a company. Invitation to Demo Day: We run investor demo days twice a year. As a Pear portfolio company, you are invited to present at our Demo Day. You can join our PearX fundraising bootcamp three weeks prior to Demo Day and we’ll work with you to get you ready to present to hundreds of top-tier investors. What are typical check sizes? We write early checks that range from $250K to $5M. No idea is too early to bring to us. We meet mission-driven founders where they’re at, and we’re willing to back entrepreneurs who are eager to solve big problems in large markets, even prior to finding the perfect solution. PRE-SEED: $250K -$2M SEED: $1M – $5M FOLLOW-ON: Up to $10M Our focus areas. We invest in the following market sectors. Consumer: Technology including social, marketplaces, subscription, e-commerce, creator economy, and more. SaaS: Purposeful tools that help businesses of all sizes work faster and smarter. Enterprise: Infrastructure powering the next generation of developers and builders. Web3: Infrastructure for the next generation of the internet and the ownership economy. Healthcare: Software and tech-enabled services innovating on care delivery. Deep Tech: Companies focused on space, robotics, semiconductors, and more. FinTech: Solutions for payments, infrastructure, data analytics and privacy, and more. BioTech: Platforms across therapeutics, diagnostics, and life science tools and services. Climate Tech: Technologies that have the ability to create more sustainable systems around energy, transportation, carbon removal, food systems, buildings, and more.

Our approach keeps founders at the heart of everything we do. We areConviction-led: We value independent decision-making and lead all our investments. Long-term partners: We stay fully committed to founders' vision, no matter how long it takes. Sector specialists: We each focus on specific sectors to build a deep, informed point of view that fuels our investment strategy and portfolio support. Transparent: We keep founders in the loop and prioritize honest communication, making us partners they never have to second-guess. Engaged: We believe in staying actively involved through meaningful board participation and functional support. Our journey started like many other startups – in a Bengaluru basement 2016 When we set out to raise our first fund, the Indian VC landscape was shaky at best. Investors were cautious, several foreign VC majors had left the ecosystem, and successful exits were hard to come by. Amidst skepticism about the Indian market, we defiantly believed that the "golden decade" of Indian technology was upon us. We saw an opportunity for VC 2.0 in India – one that was stage-focused, expertise-driven, and committed to prioritizing real growth alongside valuations. Undeterred by a tough fundraising climate, we knocked on 1,200 doors to raise Stellaris’ first fund. These early struggles shaped Stellaris’ culture, allowing us to fully resonate with the fundraising challenges faced by early-stage entrepreneurs. 2017 We launched our first fund of $90 million. From the outset, we established a principle of having specialists on our team, enabling us to tap into deep sector knowledge, spot promising opportunities, and provide tailored support to the companies we backed. Out of our 19 investments in our first fund, 9 surpassed a valuation of $100 million, with several others on track to achieve this milestone. 2021 We closed our second fund of $225M and backed 25 companies, many of which are poised to become the leaders of tomorrow. We also had our first significant exit in the portfolio when 6Sense, a US SaaS company, acquired Slintel, in which Stellaris was the first institutional investor. 2023 Our portfolio company, Mamaearth, which we backed at the Series A stage in 2018, successfully completed its IPO. 2024 We launched our third fund of $300M and are now managing over $600M in assets. We're ready to support the next wave of innovative businesses with the same grit and determination that brought us here.

We invest in companies that leverage differentiated technologies and scalable business models to generate financial returns and drive innovation. We believe technology will meaningfully transform all sectors of the economy, from property development, to HR processes, to new cyber security challenges. We support the growth of leaders at the forefront of these transformations. THE AVP PLATFORM PROVIDES A UNIQUE AND DIFFERENTIATED VALUE PROPOSITION ARTICULATED AROUND 3 MAIN PILLARS: A multi-stage investment remit with independent, cross-fertilized strategies A global investment platform A unique network of LPs including AXA & Equitable, key partners for business development AVP is a $1bn venture capital firm Investing in seed and early stage companies through AVP Early Stage, and in growth stage companies through AVP Capital. We partner with exceptional founders who are building great companies. In our early stage investments, we look for product-market fit and initial traction. In our growth-stage investments, we seek companies with attractive unit economics, a robust customer base, and significant revenue growth. Our relationship with AXA means unique access for our portfolio companies to:Some of the world’s best risk managers, financial advisors, and data scientists AXA’s distribution networks and client base AXA’s strong global franchises and different lines of expertise – Property & Casualty, Life & Savings, Health, and Asset Management – provide a distinctive business portfolio. AVP’s expertise in our target sectors, global footprint, and relationship with our anchor investors AXA and Equitable and other LP allow us to meaningfully help our portfolio companies realize their potential. AVP’s value proposition is tailored for entrepreneurs, case by case, to create and deliver value. AVP portfolio companies will have preferred access to AXA’s resources, including the buying power and distribution capabilities of a €100B revenue company with 107 million customers. SEVERAL PILLARS TO SUPPORT COMPANIES: Global presence and ability to help companies scale internationally Introductions to AXA and our broader network as a potential customer, partner, distributor, or even strategic partner Strong expertise in several fields (enterprise software, marketplaces, fintech, consumer technologies and all insurance / asset management related verticals) Access to AXA and Equitable’s deep expertise in insurance and asset management, as well as the specialized expertise of our other LPs.

For nearly thirty years, RRE Ventures has been a leading venture capital firm in New York with nearly $2.5B under management and +400 portfolio companies. With over 25 IPOs and dozens of trade sales through the years, there is a lot going on at any given time. Recent well-known companies include Datadog, Venmo, Braintree, DCG, Noom, Kindbody, Spring Health, Olo, and BuzzFeed, among many other category-defining businesses. We pride ourselves not only on investing in great entrepreneurs and delivering stellar returns to our LPs but also on being supportive partners to our portfolio companies and active members of the venture community.

Our current thesis is that valuable data and supporting infrastructure can create defensible businesses with more capital efficient scaling. We look for teams that understand how to generate and leverage proprietary data into scalable B2B platforms. We typically invest at the “early growth” stage of a company - after early product/market fit has been established, but before a company is ready for significant growth capital. Our team's experience – working together in this space since 2013 – brings differentiated insights into how data can be leveraged to create value. Entrepreneurs and investors who partner with us find that we hustle, dig deep, and make rounds happen. We approach each investment with a distinct strategy, leveraging tools, data, processes, relationships, and experience our team has built around the concept of valuable data assets. While we are flexible in our approach, we do have guiding principles about what we look for and how we support our companies. The following posts provide some additional insight into these principles and hopefully give a sense of what it is like to partner with us as an investor or founder.

We focus on new, innovative models in the consumer internet, business services, and advertising markets. We look to make seed or syndicate private equity investments in early-stage, private companies run by exceptional entrepreneurs. Stevens Ventures will also make secondary investments in promising later-stage businesses. In addition to investing, we look to provide value by assisting entrepreneurs with strategy, product development, and connections. Focus AreasLocal Search Vertical SaaS FinTech Mobility Automotive SMB Marketing