Seattle venture firm Founders’ Co-op unveiled its sixth fund — $50 million, matching the size of its previous fund — to back another batch of early-stage tech startups.
Chris DeVore, founding managing partner at Founders’ Co-op, said about 80–90% of investments will go to Pacific Northwest founders, typically at the pre-product or pre-revenue stage.
Founded in 2008, Founders’ Co-op was an early backer of billion-dollar companies such as Remitly, Outreach, and Auth0.
The firm is sticking to its core strategy of backing ambitious technical founding teams in its backyard and helping them build companies that go on to raise capital elsewhere.
“Our strategy has always been to be the best first-check investor in our chosen market, not to grow our AUM and wind up competing with the money-center investors our founders need for the next leg of the journey,” DeVore wrote in a blog post.
He added, in reference to the fund size: “It’s not bigger, because as they say in venture, ‘your fund size is your strategy.’”
GeekWire previously reported on the fund earlier this year.
The new fund will go to about 30 companies. Average initial checks will range from $1 million to $1.5 million. The firm aims for 10% ownership at the first investment. It does not invest in specific verticals, instead placing more weight on entrepreneurs.
“We’re lucky to be alive in the greatest era of compounding technological advancement in human history,” DeVore wrote in the post. “And we expect that acceleration to continue. But no moment in the hype cycle — up to and including the current LLM wave — matters more than the people we back and the problems they choose to solve.”
Founders’ Co-op is now based inside Foundations, the new hub for Seattle-area entrepreneurs founded last year by Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op. It has quickly become a magnet for the city’s startup community — and an advantage for Founders’ Co-op.
“Foundations is Aviel’s love-letter to the local founder community — so it’s not a fund project — but by making Seattle a better place to be a founder, and helping the strongest and most committed founders connect and share with each other, it has absolutely put compelling new investment opportunities in our path,” DeVore told GeekWire.
Asked this morning if the firm is still bullish on Seattle, DeVore said: “like you wouldn’t believe.”
Some of the firm’s more recent investments include land use data startup Aarden AI, business automation AI company Logic, and internal help desk startup Ravenna.
DeVore said one team “particularly worth watching at the moment” is RowZero, a Seattle startup that sells spreadsheet software and raised $10 million in a seed round earlier this year.
Most limited partners in the new fund are returning investors, with a few new backers from outside the region who “believe in small funds and the PNW as a differentiated and underserved market,” DeVore said.
Founders’ Co-op raised $50 million for its fifth fund in 2021 and $25 million for its fourth fund in 2018.
DeVore previously led the Techstars Seattle accelerator but stepped down in 2019 to focus on Founders’ Co-op full time. Ginzburg, a Simply Measured co-founder who joined the firm in 2015 and became general partner in 2018, was managing director of Amazon’s Alexa Accelerator from 2017 to 2020.
Ginzburg launched Foundations in the aftermath of the surprising closure of Techstars Seattle last year.
Other Seattle-area firms raising new funds include Ascend, Flying Fish, and Graham & Walker. Longtime firm Madrona raised $770 million for its new funds earlier this year.