Lerer Hippeau

Founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz (known as "a16z") is a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, California, that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. We are stage agnostic: We invest in seed to late-stage technology companies, across the consumer, enterprise, bio+healthcare, crypto, and fintech spaces. a16z has $28.2B in assets under management across multiple funds, including the $2.9B Bio funds, the $3.1B Crypto funds, and the Cultural Leadership Fund. a16z is defined by respect for the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial company building process; we know what it’s like to be in the founder’s shoes. The firm is led by general partners, many of whom are former founders/operators, CEOs, or CTOs of successful technology companies, and who have domain expertise ranging from biology to crypto to distributed systems to security to marketplaces to financial services. We aim to connect entrepreneurs, investors, executives, engineers, academics, industry experts, and others in the technology ecosystem. We have built a network of experts including technical and executive talent; top media and marketing resources; Fortune 500/Global 2000 companies; as well as other technology decision makers, influencers, and key opinion leaders. a16z uses this network as part of our commitment to help our portfolio companies grow their business, so our operating teams provide entrepreneurs with access to expertise and insights across the entire spectrum of company building.

The most powerful ideas, companies, and industries aren’t created overnight. With a community built on collective experience and fueled by curiosity, Slow understands the entrepreneurial journey. Investing at the center of technology and on the edges of science, society, and culture, Slow gives curious founders the resources, connections, experiences, and empathy required to build strong, sustainable companies. We are generalists and invest in early stage teams and ideas ranging from Social Networking to Consumer Brands to SaaS, and Crypto. We believe - and have seen proven time and again - that great things frequently take time to inflect, and believe that our number-one job is to back great founders on their journey. In the last ~decade we have invested in the earliest rounds of over 500 companies, including… Consumer-Ish Nextdoor Private social network for your neighborhood Hipcamp Discover and book the best campsites in California Postmates Same day urban delivery platform Birchbox Subscription commerce for beauty products Allbirds Environmentally friendly footwear. Casper Digitally introduced brand of mattresses. Birdies Fashionable women’s slippers. BarkBox Subscription commerce for dogs Even Interest-free credit to keep your paycheck steady. Citizen People protect each other Good Dog Find puppies from responsible breeders. Fintech-Y Robinhood Mobile stock brokerage Venmo Social payment app Teamshares employee ownership for small business. Eco One balance to save, spend, and make money HM Bradley Unlock your money’s potential VGS Payment data security & compliance infrastructure Human Interest 401(ks) for SMBs Astra The Automation Platform for Money Movement Wax Insurance Protect your passion SaaS-Ie Airtable Modern database software. Domino Data Lab Enterprise data science platform. Frontapp Customer management platform Tonkean Next generation management platform. Otter AI-powered voice translation app. OpenPhone Mobile app for a business phone number Slack Work messaging Amplio Risk prediction & component sourcing Consumer-Medical-Ish Ro Direct-to-consumer telehealth. Livongo Health Personalized Tools for Chronic Condition Management Plume Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy From Anywhere Pillpack Simplified Pharmacy Fairsquare Medical Your Medicare One-Stop-Shop Wheel powering virtual care Brightside online treatment for depression and anxiety Embark Dog DNA & health testing Flossy For patients without dental insurance Creator-Y Juice Banking trusted by the best creators Stem distribution and payments for musicians Human DAOs lead by creators Pearpop creator collaboration on demand Real-World-Ish Astra Lower cost rocket launches. Common Technology-enabled residential operator. Running Tide Automated ocean harvesting technologies. Zipline Global on-demand delivery. Metropolis mobile commerce and modern parking Pollen Own your network Crypto Solana Scalable blockchain infrastructure. Klaytn The Ground for All Blockchain Services Chia A new blockchain and smart transaction platform Aleo Where Applications Become Private. Algorand A pure proof of stake blockchain platform. Diem A trusted and innovative financial network. Ampleforth The rebasing currency. Lightning Labs layer-two bitcoin. Fold Wallet Bitcoin wallet. River The best place to buy, sell BTC And Many More….

We make 50+ angel investments per year into European technology startups. Our initial check size is €100k, we invest in Pre-seed and Seed rounds. We are looking for extremely ambitious teams who do something that nobody else is doing and maybe it is already working a little bit. Once invested, we coach founders to product market fit and help them raise Series A. Jens Lapinski, Jag Singh, Mara Larson-Richard, and Matthaus Krzykowski are Partners who make angel investments and coach founders. John von Berenberg-Consbruch is a Partner who makes larger follow-on investments in our portfolio companies. Oliver Clasen is a Partner who focuses on our company growth. Eckart Koerner is our CFO, he looks after legal and finance. We have made angel investments in 150+ startups that have raised in excess of €1.9 billion in follow-on funding and have a market cap of over €4BN. Companies we backed with angel checks include Rasa, Everphone, Impala, Usercentrics, Coachhub, Kencko, Spacelift, Symmetrical, Depoly, Recap, DappRadar, Opna, Ivy, Bling, Howbout and many more.

Founded by Peter Chernin, Jesse Jacobs, and Mike Kerns, The Chernin Group (TCG) is a multi-stage investment firm dedicated to building consumer businesses. The TCG portfolio includes Collectors Universe, Dapper Labs, Epic Gardening, Exploding Kittens, Food52, Headspace, Hodinkee, Lovevery, MeatEater, Opensea, Oura, Sketchy, Surfline, The Pro’s Closet, Zed Run and more. With a focus on majority and significant minority investments in growing consumer businesses, the TCG team has a track record of working with world-class consumer brands in digital media, commerce, marketplaces, sports, gaming, consumer finance, consumer blockchain, and health and wellness brands and platforms. At TCG we follow our curiosity, live with conviction, and find a little levity in our days. We don’t take small bets – we’re all in. With offices and team members in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Denver and decades of experience building diverse business models, best-in-class teams, and lasting brands – we help our portfolio realize their full potential.

Blue Lion is a multi-stage investment firm focused on high growth technology companies, predominantly across the US and Europe. The partners have invested $400m over the last 10 years into transformational companies, such as Aetion Health, Blockchain.com, Builder.ai, Casafari, Even Healthcare, Figure, Forward Health, Glovo, Maker Studios, Omio, Opendoor, Pipe, Revolut, SoFI, Taulia, as well as many other early stage companies.

Bold. Brave. Brilliant. Brazen. The founders we back are all this, and more. They are unreasonable, they are crazy ambitious, obsessed with solving hard, gnarly problems. Problems whose solutions transform lives and impact society. And, it takes a revolutionary founder, and a transformational company to solve these problems, and effect change. We back these transformational companies, and their revolutionary founders early, and remain lifelong partners. How does Blume evaluate early stage startups? In our framework, we look at three criteria to evaluate startups – size of market or opportunity, team quality and finally, investability or probability of the next round of capital. Our approximate weightage for Opportunity : Team : Investability is 40 : 40 : 20. Let us double click on these three criteria. Market size or opportunity: Pick too small a market and even the best team can’t build a large scalable business. The best founders know how to reshape a market opportunity and build solutions to fit the largest of the market opportunities. That said, one has to begin with the aggregate opportunity being very large. For example, are Ola and Uber a ride hailing app or a large scale urban transportation business? The market size expands 5-10x when the latter is applied. At Blume, we try to find a portfolio balance between founders who can chase a large market opportunity domestically or build a tech-led differentiated product for global markets (which increase Founding teams: These are the most important variables for us or even most VCs at our stage. In every decision, once the other two factors are seen as a go, the clincher element in a yes/no decision boils down to the founding team – their expertise in solving for this space, as well as the integrity, mission, passion and persistence that one can gauge at this early stage of business. Investability or probability of next rounds of capital: The reality of how the later stage funding market is shaped to take risky bets in the ecosystem is important to consider while funding, especially in young and concentrated ecosystems like India, and that’s why we attribute 20% weightage to this element in India. We force ourselves to evaluate how much capital may be required to build to exitable scale and how challenging it is to raise that capital. As the funding ecosystem matures, we may shrink weightage of this in the future. Great founders overcome all of this but if we can select such that we have better odds at the starting point, why not? The above framework helps us shortlist but finally, it is a (increasingly improving) trained gut call that ends up building out the portfolio. What is Blume's investment criteria? Blume prefers ventures that have achieved some degree of customer validation, where the product is already launched in market and we are getting customer signups and feedback. We do make exceptions on the above for seasoned operators and second-time founders, but typically with first-time founders, we do not do idea stage or pre-MVP investments. If you are a B2B startup or an ecommerce / consumer transaction play, an annualised revenue rate (or revenues) of $375k (₹3cr) and above is a good milestone to reach out to us. If you are a marketplace startup, then reach out to us when you are nearing or have crossed a monthly GMV of ₹50 lacs a month. If you are a consumer app that isn't monetising yet, then ping us when you near or cross MAUs of 25k / DAUs of 5k. The above are broad guidelines, and not hard rules. We do make exceptions. If in doubt, reach out! How much does Blume invest? We are a seed / pre-Series A fund. While we are fairly flexible on the investment quantum, typically we have seen our investments range across from $1.5 to $3m (₹12 to 24 crs). We do optimise however for a stake of anywhere from 12 to 20%. These stake requirements reflect the depth and extent of support we provide to the startup – from fundraising and hiring to business development etc. We also anticipate the rounds of dilution that every successful startup will undergo, and the desired holding that we need to hold at the point of exit. Does Blume invest in international startups? We invest in startups that are Indian at heart or origin, but are willing to conquer the world market if needed to build scale. About a third of our portfolio is of this nature – taking Indian engineering skills to build products for global markets. Unfortunately, We DO NOT invest in startups that are international and have NO strong Indian connection / founders. We are also strong believers that to invest as a ‘generalist tech VC’ as we are, we need to be more and more focussed on a particular geography. We need to see as much of the available annual pipeline to know that we’ve truly picked 10 great founders / startups to invest in. We have no such advantage when we are looking outside the country; which is why we stay away from the temptation of looking at pipeline from international markets. What kind of sectors does Blume invest in? With our new Fund, our fourth since inception, we are looking to invest about 60-65% of the new fund in domestic-heavy sectors such as healthcare, financial services, commerce and brands, jobs and education, and digital media and gaming. The other 35-40% of the fund will focus on SaaS, and DeepTech (including CleanTech, manufacturing, blockchain) companies, typically in B2B, that can innovate and engineer with local talent pools, and yet scale globally. Does Blume have a preference between B2B and B2C? We like both. India is a consumer market that is poised to explode, as people move to the digital economy to spend an increasingly larger share of their wallet’s purchasing power. That makes it attractive to build a strong consumer proposition in India. And thus our B2C portfolio. We are also now very good at taking our science and engineering skills in software and other areas, and building commercial applications at scale, often for the global market. These constitute the majority of B2B ideas in our portfolio and we like this space a lot. Where do I send my pitch? How do I reach out to Blume? We get anywhere between 4,000 to 5,000 ideas pitched to us annually, across the team, across all formats. This includes referrals, cold mails, DMs on social channels etc. We have given up counting :) We invest in about 10-12 of these per year. As Blume has grown, we've looked at the empirical data and discovered that the vast majority of our investments were referrals from our contacts in the ecosystem. You can count the exceptions to this rule with one hand in every cycle, and still have a few fingers to spare! These referrals come from our own founders we have backed, other founders who know that we will do right by their angel investments and our extensive set of friends, investors and well wishers in the ecosystem. The exceptions, while not impossible, are indeed rare. Ceteris paribus (all things considered), you are better off reaching us through a trusted common friend. In a highly networked startup ecosystem, it is not that hard to reach us through the strongest possible mutual connection. But if that is not possible, do reach out to us cold. Your email will certainly be read, even if it is not always responded to. We have ensured that our internal systems catch every pitch - cold or warm or hot. When writing in cold, a considered and researched mail (much like a quality college application) is the only way to attempt such a reach out. Please check out the team page, find the best person in the Investment team who has invested in and / or covers the sector you're building in. Do check out their social profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter) to access their contact info. Our email ids are not hard to guess as well! Preferably write to one person at a time, in the firm. The above are good principles for you irrespective of which firm you approach / pitch to. Nothing works better than a warm, referred introduction - it always gets the rightful attention. Please note that we have done away with a pitch form, or a common email id. From our experience, we found that the volume of inbound traffic was indeed high, but not always relevant, and thus almost impossible to assign a resource to just monitor these inbound gates.