The Humans of New Age Capital

Authenticity. Empathy. Transparency. We live by these words. Our goal is to make the VC industry approachable and transparent to founders thus creating loyalty and affinity for our mission. This uniquely positions us to partner with the best founders who find mutual alignment on their entrepreneurial journeys because of New Age’s shared experiences, empathetic world view, unwavering authenticity, and strong cultural awareness. It’s our fundamental belief that following this path will inevitably lead to our outperformance as investors.

We care deeply about the core fundamentals of company building. From our perspective, the companies that we believe have the highest potential for success and represent the ideal candidate for a potential investment share the below characteristics:

◦ AI Builds the Product. Humans Build the Company. There are so many existing problems in the world that could and should be solved leveraging technology and AI and the cost to build and operate a startup is collapsing. AI now handles elements of product development, operations, branding, and go-to-market that previously required entire departments. The founders who win in the AI era will combine technical leverage with deep interpersonal skills, contextual domain expertise, and scalable distribution strategies. That combination is rare. When we find it, we back it.

◦ Founder Profile. The Founding team is representative of diverse backgrounds and perspectives. This is core to our strategy and mission of supporting founders no matter what their background or where they come from.

◦ Cultivated Relationship. It’s extremely important for us to get to know founders well in advance of needing to raise capital, ideally 3+ months. Within our portfolio, we’ve fostered relationships for 3 months - 2 years before investing. We believe deeply in our ability to assess people and potential which only gets better the more time to we get to spend with founders - observing how they execute on the business and how well they communicate. This time also allows us to evaluate if and how we can actually provide tangible value to the growth of the company before we invest.

◦ Early Product-Market Fit. Once you build something several early customers are willing to use and actually pay for, this is when we like to invest because it means you created tangible value in a market and figured out how to capture that value economically.

◦ Capital Efficiency Is the New Alpha. Unit Economics Matter. Financial Discipline Matters. Efficient Capital Allocation Matters. As a founder you MUST understand your company’s finances and operations and stay close to capital providers. Knowing this significantly increases your ability to build, fund and scale a company to a successful exit. We prioritize nimble, AI-powered companies that launch faster, operate leaner, and reach profitability earlier.

◦ Strong Market Potential. We look for opportunities where the obtainable market is large ($1B+) and fragmented enough where a company with a superior product, aligned revenue model, and strong execution can reasonably capture enough market share to eventually generate $50M - $100M in annual revenue. It’s also important that the market has tailwinds in its favor thus increasing the size or value of the market.

◦ Strong Return Profile. We’re looking to invest in bangers 💥. Every investment we make has to have the potential to return our entire fund.

Founders must have deep domain expertise within the industry they are building in while leveraging AI to deliver value to customers in a way that creates a durable competitive edge — not just wrapping a model (LLM) and calling it a product. We prefer to invest in founders who operate autonomously but also have a level of maturity that allows us to trust their judgment whether we agree with their decisions or not. We look for founders that embody humility, resilience, integrity, coachability, positivity and strong communication skills.

Once we’ve had an initial meeting and expressed interest in a company, we ask founders to send us monthly updates outlining the company’s progress and we schedule meetings every couple of months until the company is ready to raise their seed round.

Just fill out the I’M A FOUNDER form on our website. That is how we track our pipeline. Due to the high volume of submissions we receive, we unfortunately only respond to companies that fit our criteria.

The best time to reach out to us is when you have launched a product and revenue is approaching $500K. This gives us the time to build rapport and see your progress over time. If you have already started your seed fundraising process, reach out to us as early as possible as we will still need to build a relationship and do not make investment decisions quickly. If you are closing your round in 2 months or less, we are unlikely to participate.

Yes, we prefer to lead rounds and can make introductions to co-investors. We require that founders raise at least $3M, inclusive of our investment.

Our investments process is straightforward. After getting to know founders and watching them execute over several months, we review all prior conversations, notes we took, and company updates provided by founders to determine if the profile of the company meets our criteria. If it does, we schedule a final meeting with founders to address any outstanding concerns. We then send the founder our offer to invest notifying them of the terms, the timeline, and attach a draft of the financing documents. We also make it explicitly clear that our commitment to invest is contingent upon us completing due diligence. We send over a formal due diligence questionnaire to complete and if there are no concerns, we move forward with signing the financing documents and wiring the money. This entire process normally takes one month but can last longer.

We invest through a post-money SAFE and require a side letter.

We do not take board seats, but we do behave as a de facto board and require monthly calls and reporting once we invest in a company.

While we’re always excited to invest in a new company, the reality is there is still a long way to go before an exit. As seed investors, our primary focus is preparing companies to control their own destiny by achieving breakeven or profitability prior to raising growth capital.

We've developed a process in which we work with founders to set and achieve operational and growth milestones, build a curated list of next-stage investors, sharpen pitch decks, and develop their storytelling capabilities. Our priority is to help founders refine their narrative, accelerate go-to-market, and unlock scalable distribution. We also provide guidance and resources in regards to business operations and strategy.

Lastly, it is paramount that we establish a growth mentality and an air of inevitable success within founders we back so they are prepared for venture scale growth.

We’ll make sure you get your bread and you know the ropes.