Deploy Capital is a small, experimental fund of funds for backing the next generation of fund managers. Over the last few years we've been sharing our learnings along the way with angels and emerging managers who are looking to scale into their first fund, and now we raised a small fund around it to back them.
We help new emerging managers go from zero to one:
- Strategic and tactical advice – All in all, the playbook for raising seed funding for startups already exists – round sizes, check sizes, range of dilution, who to raise from, and expected norms between founders and investors are mostly understood within the industry. However, this doesn't really exist for new fund managers. The advice, norms, and major fund decisions tend to be based on what makes sense for larger (institutional) firms, which is quite different than starting out as a small fund manager.
- Fundraise help – One of the single most helpful things that people who took a chance on us was making introductions to potential LPs. That kind of momentum is hard to quantify, and can be trajectory changing. Over the past few years, we've been actively opening up our LP network and making relevant LP intros when we see a potential fit, which has tended to be quite helpful when people are just starting out in particular.
- Capital – Of course, we also provide capital! While our check size is relatively small, the main "value add" tends to be around impacting the speed of a fundraise and the learnings around how to get a new fund off the ground, and how to approach key decisions.
Some of the funds we've backed include: