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Heavybit

heavybit.com

About

Heavybit is an early-stage venture capital firm and the premiere investor in developer-first startups. Since 2013, we’ve worked with numerous Pre-Seed to Series A companies that have redefined how teams build, deploy, secure, and scale mission-critical software. More than just capital, we work directly with teams to help our technical founders achieve breakout success. Heavybit and its portfolio companies are pioneers in building bottom-up go-to-market strategies for enterprise software companies.

Best-in-Class Companies

Our bottom-up developer and enterprise companies define categories and change the course of how developers build, deploy, secure, and scale enterprise technology

Intentional Capital

Purpose-built for technical founders, we invest capital backed by candor from technical partners who’ve been there before and advised dozens of successful companies.

$500k-$5m PRE-SEED TO SERIES A

Unmatched Expertise

Heavybit is the domain authority on bottom-up developer companies. Our team-based structured approach helps founders turn visions into movements, products into platforms, and contributors into communities.

600+ ADVISORS

A Unique Community

Heavybit’s partnership, team, and community of technical founders and 600+ domain experts have an unequaled track record of nurturing developer-first startups.

140+ TECHNICAL FOUNDERS

What types of companies do you invest in?

Founders who want intentional capital to create category-defining developer-first products. We invest in traditional developer tools, cloud native infrastructure, open source, DevOps, DevSecOps, etc. Heavybit offers team-based structured support and a platform tailored to your specific needs that incorporates our unique partnership, an active community of 600+ domain specific advisors, and fellow Heavybit startup founders. We’ve worked with founders in 15 countries and 35 cities.

Learn more about Heavybit's approach to investing in developer-first startups in this article from our managing director.

When should I contact you?

It’s never too early to talk to us. We love to invest on day one with the first check but also join companies throughout their early-stage journey.

What is your typical investment?

We understand every venture is unique and today’s early-stage companies capitalize themselves on different schedules with a variety of instruments at their disposal. We adapt on a company-by-company basis. Our typical initial check size is $500k-$1M in a Pre-seed round, $1M-3M in a Seed round, and $3M-$5M in a Series A. We are hands-on investors who work with a small, concentrated portfolio of companies. We prefer to lead or co-lead the Pre-seed and Seed rounds we invest in. We do not lead Series A’s.

How does Heavybit work?

Once Heavybit invests in your company, we begin working with you to build your tailored curriculum and experience. In broad strokes, this includes a structured approach, a unique community of dev-first founders, and team-level learning and benefits.

A Structured Approach

  • Goal Setting: Your partners will help you determine your key milestones for the next several months. In many cases this includes planning for major product and feature releases, pricing and positioning review, critical hires, and user acquisition and revenue targets. From here we build a curriculum of weekly activities tailored to your needs.
  • Board Representation: In the case we take a board seat, we want to offer best practices in board management including creating rigor around effective meetings, key data points & avoiding board issues. This includes regularly calendared prep & meetings, agenda & deck review, surfacing actionable board requests, and using regular updates to solidify trust and transparency.
  • Partner Office Hours: Heavybit pre-schedules twice monthly Partner calls (minimum) in order to ensure we offer strategic timely support and play an active role in your ongoing progress. We also work with you more frequently during critical times for your business.
  • Tailored Advisor Office Hours: Heavybit has a network of 600+ domain-specific advisors. From this pool we hand-select advisors for you, pre-brief them, and offer hour-long 1:1 meetings to discuss both tactical execution and the implications of your founder-level decisions. Advisors include technical founders and domain experts who’ve scaled developer-first marketing, product, sales etc.
  • Group Sessions: Group Sessions are confidential, topic-specific online sessions with 3-4 founders who face similar challenges and share similar goals. These sessions are moderated by a domain-specific advisor. In some cases we also allow founders to invite early execs to learn from these sessions.

A Unique Community of Dev-First Founders

In addition to our broader community, our portfolio founders include more than 140 technical founders in 34 cities and 15 countries. See portfolio page for more details. We convene founders in a number of different ways including:

  • Founder Forum: Heavybit curates founder sharing sessions based on teams with similar goals and challenges. Founder forum is a confidential, topic-specific online session moderated by a partner and including a small group of 3-4 founders. Founders tend to be at a similar stage of product-market fit.
  • Founder Slack: This is a private, thread-driven Slack channel for Q&A amongst founders. Founders confidentially discuss their immediate challenges, share information like sales comp, pricing strategy, discovery questions, and customer intel.
  • Founder Events: Heavybit hosts 6-8 in-person founder-only drinks, dinner & social events each year. Some of these dinners include the entire portfolio, including late stage alumni founders, and some of these dinners are curated to include a smaller group of founders at a similar stage. This allows for comfortable off-the-record conversations and discussions throughout the year.
  • Founder 1:1’s: We make regular introductions and facilitate interactions between like-minded founders to ensure that teams can learn from each other and find new ways to partner. Introductions often yield joint promotional activities, intel sharing, and key technical integrations.
  • Customer Discovery 1:1’s: We also make introductions to select alumni founders in order to gain enterprise product and discovery feedback and to kickstart conversations with prospective customers within the portfolio.
  • Friends & Family Program: Heavybit’s Friends and Family Program lets portfolio teams offer each other discounted product & support.

Team-Level Learning & Benefits

  • Library: Heavybit’s library includes 1,400+ educational resources for developer-first startup founders and their teams. We encourage teams to study the Library prior to requesting time with domain-specific advisors.
  • Speaker Series: These monthly presentations are streamed online live and offer founders and early team members a chance to hear from experts in sales, marketing and product design. A complete catalog of Speaker Series videos lives in our Library. Founders and teams are encouraged to attend live to ask questions in real-time. Speakers are often invited back for 1:1 advisor office sessions in which founders can receive more in-depth and tailored advice.
  • DevGuild: DevGuild is a twice yearly conference featuring the CEOs, founders, and top execs at leading developer-first companies. In the past we’ve held conferences on community-building, product marketing, pricing, enterprise-readiness, content, demand gen and developer experience. The outcome of these conferences go beyond immediate learnings, and have included new hires, customers, and users for our member cos. Watch previous DevGuild talks here.
  • Community Slack: In addition to our main Founder-Only Slack channel, Heavybit’s Community Slack offers channels for early product, marketing, and sales peers to connect and share learning across the portfolio. These threads regularly grow into robust sub-communities and dedicated practitioner events.
  • Podcast Starter Kit: Heavybit has its own podcast network with developer focused shows from a variety of portfolio companies. We guide early teams in developing a show’s focus, offer design, editing and hosting free-of-charge while a show is getting started, and help teams promote some of their first thought leadership.
  • Content Course: Heavybit helps early marketing teams create an editorial calendar & develop their content pipeline.
  • Event Organizer 101: Heavybit offers a primer on event programming, logistics, & promotion. This is typically done in support of your first marketing or community hires.
  • Vendor Referrals: Heavybit offers portfolio companies access to our network of marketing, design, content, and production vendors.

Markets

Cloud Infrastructure
Developer Tools
DevOps And DevSecOps
Enterprise Software
Open Source Software
Software Security

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