Kickstart Fund

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.

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.

At BADideas.fund, we aspire to be the kind of investors we wanted when we were building our startups. We invest €50-€250K tickets in early-stage startups from CEE with global ambitions. BADideas.fund is led by experienced entrepreneurs who have walked the startup building path, have raised funds from investors and can help founders navigate around obstacles they encounter along the way. Among BADideas.fund members are founders and operators, who’ve been building such companies as Vimeo ($450M funding), Printify ($54M), Pandadoc ($51M), Pipedrive ($90M), Bolt ($1.3B funding), Apollo.io ($151M), Bird ($783M funding), Shopify ($122M), Whimsical ($30M), Lokalise ($56M), Deel ($679M), Printful ($130M), Twilio ($614M), Veriff ($192.3M), Wise ($1.3B funding). Since the recent launch, BADideas.fund has invested in five startups already, among which: Breezit (Lithuania), Recruitlab (Estonia), Lande (Latvia), Fuel Finance (Ukraine) , Rapidworks (Estonia).

We are a European early-stage, SME Tech first-cheque writer. We initially invest EUR 100K to EUR 1M in start-ups at the pre-seed & seed stage that are primarily located in the DACH & UK. We focus on vertical, embedded and Trifecta solutions (combining marketplaces with SaaS and Payment). We shy away from horizontal stand-alone solutions. We look for SME Tech industry and category leaders who can sell to enterprise at some point. Aside of LTV:CAC ratios, we love to see upmarket potential, in other words SME-first startups moving upmarket by selling to enterprises.

Focused on the rising consumption story in India and Indian SaaS companies catering to a global market. CONSUMER TECH Backing tech native businesses for India’s internet users and middle-class. AgriTech EdTech HealthTech SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS) Backing product-led SaaS startups that can reach a global scale. Automation, Collaboration and Intelligence Vertical SaaS SaaS enabled marketplaces FINTECH Backing companies which manage finances in the most tech efficient way Vertical neo banks, lending Embedded Finance, infra APIs Insurtech Alternative investing DEEPTECH Backing companies solving deep engineering problems Artificial Intelligence Robotics / Drones Space tech and Semiconductors OUR APPROACH We invest in people rather than companies. From great entrepreneurs emerge great brands and companies. We are good listeners and that is a trait needed in our profession to grow. We have a non-intrusive approach and we completely believe in the entrepreneurs we have backed. An entrepreneur can think of us more as a resource and a sounding board. WHAT WE LOOK FORWe prefer to invest in mission driven founders who have relevant work experience and domain expertise Significant growth potential over the next 3 to 5 years. We prefer backing founders with at least 4-5 years of prior experience. Differentiated products or services that have strong ‘moats’ built around it. HOW WE INVESTWe invest in pre-seed and seed rounds. We invest ~US$ 250K per startup in the first round and then in follow-on rounds We are open to investing through convertible structures and instruments, however, we prefer straight equity. We generally prefer to co-invest along with other VC funds and micro VC funds In a larger round of fundraising – we co-invest with our select Limited Partners.

Open Opportunity Fund's portfolio spans, B2B SaaS, enterprise IT, artificial intelligence, fintech, and health tech. “ Opportunity Fund 1 is a $100 million fund with SoftBank as an anchor LP. The firm has invested in 75 tech companies including Atomic, Brex, Cityblock Health, Eight Sleep, Esusu, Lumu, Paystand, QuickNode, Squire, and Subject. The fund has achieved seven portfolio company exits. In 2023, the team led by Paul Judge and Marcelo Claure acquired the Fund from SoftBank and announced Fund 2 to continue to execute the thesis.