At this special Leading Institute event for startup ecosystem community leaders worldwide, we hosted an investor roundtable featuring Coyote Ventures, Startup Haven Ventures, and Untapped Capital on October 21st, focused on the topic of How to Invest in Pre-Seed Startups.
Venture capitalist and angel investors play an essential role in helping startups raise funding, recruit a team, generate traction, and ultimately scale their business. However, there are many cases where investors yield very little non-monetary impact, if any at all. Watch this video to hear from experienced investors who have supported dozens of startups - across several continents, industry sectors, and stages - and learn their best practices and tips on sourcing early-stage deal opportunities, as well as strategies for pooling resources to help startup entrepreneurs.
Joining us were an expert panel of distinguished early-stage Venture Capitalists: Yohei Nakajima, Brittany Barreto, Jessica Karr, and Bob Crimmins - watch the full video, and learn about each of the featured investors below:
Yohei Nakajima is a General Partner at Untapped Capital, and a Venture Partner at Scrum Ventures. Launched in 2020, Untapped Capital is a new VC firm Nakajima created with friend and role model Jessica Jackley, a pre-seed/seed-stage fund investing in unexpected founders: those found off the beaten path, and not well connected to VCs. Targeting young, underrepresented, small town, immigrant, and so on, these founders aren't in their network, almost by definition, and are primarily sourced through outbound, meaning Untapped reaches out to founders. Some of these companies include MilkRun (ag/food), Level (fintech/marketplaces), Obviously AI (No Code/ML), Endpoint Logistics (proptech/logistics), Tennibot (sports/robotics), and Windmill (home/climate).
As a Venture Partner at Scrum Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm investing across a range of industries in US and Japan, Yohei Nakajima previously served as the SVP of Scrum Studio from 2018 to 2020, an innovation consulting business helping organizations such as Nintendo, Panasonic, and and Dentsu find and engage with startups. Prior to that, Nakajima worked with Techstars from 2014 to 2017, where he worked on the Disney Accelerator until 2016, and then served as Techstars' Director of Pipeline, supporting all 30+ Techstars Accelerator programs worldwide in finding and recruiting the best startups.
Brittany Barreto, Ph.D. is a Co-Founding General Partner at Coyote Ventures, and the Co-Founder & Executive Director of the nonprofit FemTech Focus. Coyote Ventures is launching a $10M seed-stage venture fund in the US to invest in companies innovating in women’s health and wellness. Founded by General Partners who are scientists and industry experts, Coyote Ventures supports founders their leveraging the thousand-plus member network and media platform, FemTech Focus.
Femtech Focus is a 501c3 non-profit entity empowering the femtech industry through increased awareness, providing resources to femtech founders, and creating opportunities to support femtech startups through exposure, networking, and access to capital. The Femtech Focus Podcast with Dr. Brittany Barreto is a meaningfully provocative conversational series that brings femtech experts - including doctors, scientists, inventors, and founders - on air to talk about the innovative technology, services, and products (collectively known as femtech) that are improving women's health and wellness. The podcast gives listeners an engaging, friendly environment to learn about the past, present, and future of women’s health and wellness.
Bob Crimmins is a General Partner at Startup Haven Ventures, the venture arm of Startup Haven. Crimmins, a vet of the Seattle tech startup ecosystem, founded Startup Haven in 2005 as a community for entrepreneurs. He began running Startup Haven full-time in 2019 and then launched a Startup Haven accelerator, where Techstars and Microsoft veteran Dave Malcolm served as executive director of the accelerator.
The new fund via Startup Haven Ventures provides investments to companies participating in the accelerator, and also makes direct investments. It focuses on pre-seed companies with capital-efficient business models and early signs of commercialization. The fund is focused on the Pacific Northwest, but is also open to backing companies beyond the region - its first investments include startups Verdi, BuzzIt, DataMynt, 2Morrow, and Mesh.
Jessica Karr is a Co-Founding General Partner at Coyote Ventures and a Venture Partner at Republic. Co-founded in partnership with Dr Brittany Barreto (above), Coyote Ventures invests in early-stage companies that are innovating in women’s health and wellness. Through its exclusive partnership with FemTech Focus, Coyote Ventures is at the ground floor of women’s health innovation, picking winners at the earliest stage while partnering with corporations to create partnerships and downstream M&A activity.
Prior to launching Coyote Ventures, Karr worked for 6+ years designing and launching the Impossible Burger, as the firm's 12th employee. She has helped build a pilot impact-focused VC fund with a conscious celebrity; developed product strategies as a consultant and advisor to startups internationally; is an angel investor as well as Venture Partner at Republic.co; and is also an active investor in Portfolia’s FemTech II fund.
If you haven’t already, click here to register and join us October 21st for this deep-dive, interactive investor roundtable on How to Invest in Pre-Seed Startups!
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