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.