Durability beats peak output. Every time.

We back founders building companies that pay them — not companies built to be pitched. It's the same principle we apply to a body under strain, applied to a balance sheet under strain.

For limited partners For founders weighing a raise

capital raised, spent against a clock capital earned, compounding illustrative

The model everyone's still pitching is quietly breaking

US startups raised $412.7B in the first half of 2026. 86% of it went to AI. Two companies took $217B of the global total between them — forty-three cents of every venture dollar deployed worldwide, sitting on two cap tables. That's not the number that matters. This is:

a 50¢ / $1 of every pre-seed dollar now goes to AI, up from about 30¢ a few years ago. Total pre-seed cash was flat year over year — but the number of instruments issued fell 13%. Same pot, fewer founders holding a piece of it.

b 24% → 18% the share of pre-seed deals sized $1M–$2.5M, from Q1 2023 to Q1 2026. The middle is disappearing. What grew instead was the under-$1M round and the mega-round. If your company sits in between, you're raising into a gap.

c ~9% seed-to-Series-A conversion today, down from a historical 15–20%, while the time between rounds stretches toward 20 months. The ladder is getting longer and thinner at the same time.

Revenue is the only capital that doesn't need someone else's conviction to arrive on schedule

A raise burns down two balance sheets: the financial one, and the emotional one. The second has no bridge round.

We don't tell founders bootstrapping is noble. We tell them it's durable — and durability, not peak output, is what determines who's still standing when the market corrects. It's true of a body under chronic stress. It's true of a company under fundraising stress. Same failure mode, different balance sheet.

Founder wellness is usually treated as a perk, or ignored entirely. We treat it as a leading indicator — the untapped alpha in founder longevity — because a founder who protects their own capacity makes better decisions for longer than one who's spent it chasing a headline valuation.

How we invest

Stage & check size

Seed and early-stage, $250K–$1M. We'd rather write a right-sized check into a company built to last than chase a round built to make headlines.

What we look for

Cashflow-positive or near-cashflow-positive businesses over growth-at-all-costs. We weight durability signals as heavily as growth signals.

Founder Wellness Intensive

Our own accelerator — where we get to know founders before we invest, and where we've started collecting the data linking founder health to company durability.

Founder Total Wellness Program

Wellness retreats, fitness partnerships, and mental health support built into the partnership itself — not a perk bolted on after the term sheet.

Who we back

Access to easy capital has never been distributed evenly. Founders outside the usual networks — the ones who didn't have a warm intro to a Tier 1 fund, or a friend's-round of angel money before they'd shipped anything — have spent decades building with less of it. That scarcity forces a specific discipline: revenue first, runway conserved, growth earned rather than borrowed. It's the same discipline our whole thesis is built around. We didn't invent it. We just decided to underwrite it properly, instead of treating it as a consolation prize for founders who "couldn't" raise more.

d 50%+ of our portfolio comes from founders from underrepresented backgrounds — not a diversity target we report on for optics, but the direct, structural result of investing in the discipline this fund exists to fund.

Talk to us before you raise — or before you write the check

Limited partners

Request the fund's positioning and the case for founder wellness as an investable, risk-adjusted category.

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Founders

Building something that already pays you, or close to it? That's the conversation we want to have — before you default to a raise.

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