Great to meet you!
We get to know talented individuals long before they become founders - which often turns into us backing your company, connecting you with a team worth joining, etc.
We're founders of our own firm and are building focal to be the best partner for the most ambitious founders at the very start. When you start your company, we've ideally known you for a while already. Which is why we reached out - to get to know you.
When we invest (down the road), this is how we do it:
We lead your first round
We only enter at the start and exclusively lead your inception / first round. It's the focus you deserve.
▹ 50+ first rounds led. We've designed our firm around being your catalyzing first partner.
▹ 75% of our investments are within a month of incorporation. When we say "nothing's too early", we mean it - we don't need traction or 3rd party validation. We've signed many term sheets pre-incorporation even.
▹ ~10 investments a year / ~30 per fund. Every investment is a core position - we don't do 'option buying' or 'discovery' checks. Each company gets access to all our resources and the full weight of the partnership behind them.
Partner to moonshot founders
We back people first and foremost. They all have three things in common:
▹ Obsessed with pursuing the most asymmetric opportunities in AI.
▹ Technical builders who ship with speed and intensity (at least one on the team).
▹ Hungry to win, be challenged, and improve every day.
It leads us to invest across industries and verticals leveraging AI, and to be extremely open minded to non-consensus startups.
We only have two non-negotiables: it's your first financing, and your startup is based in the US or Canada.
What it's like to work with us
We are founders of our own firm. We know the rejections, the failures, and the hard-earned lessons that come with building a company. This gives us empathy and understanding for the ups and downs of the founder journey.
To our portfolio, we are high-bandwidth partners who work hard to be your VC of record. Our relationships run deep and we typically become the partner you turn to first in the most crucial moments.
Here's what our founders say about us:
"A true operational partner, big on fundraising, hiring, and intros i.e. to 150+ investors, which reshaped our round. Focal is the partner you want in your corner."
"This is my 5th company, and I've raised from some of the biggest names in venture. Focal is the firm you want backing you at the very start. If I ever start a 6th, they'll be my first call."
"Focal has been an incredible sounding board outshining any large multistage firms I've worked with. They provide invaluable feedback, especially on go-to-market efforts."
"Focal gets the challenges of going from 0 to 1 and their passion is unmatched. It was a no-brainer to have them lead our pre-seed for a second time (after our first exit together)."
"Focal articulates what matters and surfaces strategic opportunities without overcomplicating things. Offering an honest view of reality while trusting founders to lead."
We're network-fueled experts in building your early GTM
Nailing distribution is now more important than ever.
That's why we spend a lot of our time on your early GTM and enable you to learn from The GTM Circle, our invite-only network of 200+ of the best revenue executives at today's leading Seed through Series D startups.
Members are peers executing day-in-day-out at today's fastest growing companies, using today's best GTM tools, in today's market, and many with the same ICP / market as you.
90% of portfolio founders regularly interact with and get significant value from The GTM Circle.
Members include:
// Revenue Lead @ Anthropic
// Head of Product Marketing @ Anyscale
// Partnership Lead @ Langchain
// Head of Growth @ Deel
// Head of CS @ Notion
// Head of Growth @ Delphi
// B2B Product Marketing Lead @ Lovable
// Head of CS @ Coder
// Head of GTM Strategy & Ops @ Harvey
Your team focal
We operate as one firm. When we partner, you'll have each focal team member, our 100+ founders, global institutional LP base, and 200+ GTM operators pushing to help you win.
Our firm is managed by two longtime friends, Daniel Darling and Pascal Unger, with platform and ops run by Sydney Wasikowski. We build with the intensity of founders proving themselves in the world of venture. We partner deeply and support the entire you.
Focal operates out of our HQ in Miami, with presence in San Francisco and Nashville.
Excited to meet you!
Sydney, Daniel, and Pascal
# looking forward to our conversation
Here are some of the brilliant minds we're fortunate to have been working with since inception:
// Avocarrot (Exit) - Programmatic native ad chance for mobile publishers
// Foghorn (Exit) - Edge intelligence for industrial IoT
// Boundless Mind (Exit) - AI platform for behavior design
// Glide Health (Exit) - Revenue cycle management for healthcare
// Omni (Exit) - On demand storage and rental marketplace