How Rich Ventures Invests: What We Look for in Pre-Seed and Seed Founders

Rich Ventures is a consulting firm first and an investment firm second, and that order shapes how we invest. We have backed eleven early-stage companies across SaaS and what we call xTech: fintech, foodtech, proptech, edtech, XR. We have co-invested alongside Paradigm, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, Reach Capital and a long list of angels. Founders ask what we look for, what a check from us comes with, and how we are different from a fund. Here is the straight version.

Stage and check

We invest at pre-seed and seed. Most of our portfolio entered at the friends-and-family, pre-seed or seed round, and one, Hang, went on to raise a Series A led by Paradigm with Tiger Global participating. We are not the lead on a round. We are the operator check that comes alongside a lead or a syndicate of angels, and we are honest about that with founders from the first call.

What we look for

Because we spend our weeks consulting on go-to-market and operations, we underwrite those two things more heavily than most small investors do.

• A first customer the founder can name. Not a market size. A specific buyer with a specific trigger, and evidence the founder has already talked to twenty of them.
• A founder who sells. At least one founder has to be the first salesperson and enjoy it. We have watched excellent products stall because nobody on the founding team would pick up the phone.
• A path to a repeatable motion within a year. We do not need the motion to exist yet. We need to see how the next twelve months find it.
• Operational honesty. Founders who know their burn, their runway and their activation rate without looking them up. The portfolio companies that have done best were the ones whose founders ran the tightest weekly cadence.

What a check from us comes with

Every portfolio company gets what our consulting clients get: access to a weekly operating cadence, go-to-market and pricing help, and introductions when they are genuinely useful. Some founders use it every week. Some use it twice a year. We do not require it, and we do not charge for it. The investment and the advisory are separate decisions, and consulting clients are never required to take investment.

For founders raising, we also help with investor targeting and warm introductions. Our co-investor relationships came from doing this well for our own portfolio, not from a database.

What the portfolio taught us

A few patterns across the portfolio:

• Distribution beats product more often than founders expect. Clayful's ability to connect a student to a human coach in 60 seconds is remarkable. Its growth came from the school district channel, which is a go-to-market insight, not a product one.
• Post-sales decides the multiple. Hang's loyalty platform is only valuable if brands keep running programmes on it. Retention was the number we watched, and it is the number that justified the Series A.
• Exits come from operations. HomeRoom, our proptech investment, was acquired by Bungalow. Co-living is an operations business dressed as a real estate business, and HomeRoom ran its operations well enough that a larger operator wanted them.
• Pre-seed is a bet on the founder's learning rate. Our earliest-stage companies, Ove Touch N Go in biometric payments and Febris in XR training, are in markets that will look different in three years. We backed founders who ship and measure, because the plan will change.

How to pitch us

Send a short note to hello@richventures.io with the first customer, the current motion in numbers, the round, and the lead if there is one. If it is a fit we will book a call within a week. If it is not, we will say so and, where we can, point you to someone who is a better match. We read everything, and we are especially interested in founders building for small businesses, since that is who we serve every day.

A note on alignment

We manage more than $40M in assets and we are a small team. We will never be the biggest name on your cap table. What we offer is the investor who has run the operations you are about to build, who will be on a 30-minute call with you every week if you want it, and who has done the unglamorous post-sales work that turns a good product into a company that gets acquired.