Announcing Founders’ Co-op V

Aviel and I are thrilled to share the news that we’ve just closed a new fund, our fifth, and at $50M our largest yet.

In most ways, this is just business as usual. Our LPs, many of whom are founders themselves, love our commitment to being first and fast, writing high-conviction pre-seed and seed checks to the best technical founding teams in the Pacific Northwest. We have an enviable track record of helping those founders raise from the best later-stage investors in the world. And with over 200 companies in our combined portfolios, we’ve assembled the most powerful founder support network in the region.

What’s different this time is mostly how the world has changed around us.

When we started Founders’ Co-op back in 2008, Seattle was still a company town. Amazon and Microsoft dominated the market for talented software developers. The Bay Area still reigned supreme as the center of the startup universe. And billion-dollar startups were so rare they didn’t even have a name.

Five funds and over $100M later, the world looks different.

Seattle has become one of the most important cities in the world for cutting-edge engineering in cloud, machine learning, and enterprise software. Every global tech leader has a footprint here, many employing thousands of developers locally, creating a vibrant and highly liquid talent market.

At the same time, the Bay Area’s dominance of startup culture has eroded, partly due to a recurring failure of civic leadership, accelerated by COVID and the shift to remote work. Meanwhile, our company town has become a place where ambitious founders increasingly choose to build their startups and raise their families, even if the growth capital they need still comes from somewhere else.

We were lucky enough to team up with many of these founders at the beginning of their journeys, writing the first institutional checks into a growing herd of Seattle unicorns like Remitly, Outreach and Auth0. We created the Techstars Seattle and Alexa Accelerator programs to bring the community together around the region’s most promising founding teams from the very beginning. And we partnered with the University of Washington to house all these activities on the UW campus, injecting a new current of entrepreneurial energy into the region’s flagship research university.

So while a new fund doesn’t change much about who we are and what we do, our market is on the verge of an explosive wave of entrepreneurial growth, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with the next generation of amazing founders at the beginning of the best startup decade this region has ever seen.

We want to express our deep gratitude to the fund investors who make it possible for us to do our work (many of whom have been with us since the beginning), and to the extraordinary founders who have welcomed us into their lives as investors and business partners. We love what we do and feel lucky we get to take another swing.

Here we go.