❯Nice to meet you!
Looking forward to our conversation!
Here's some more on us ahead of our call.
We lead your first round
We exclusively lead inception / pre-seed / first rounds.
We've designed our firm around being your catalyzing first partner. It's the specialization you deserve. It's all we do. To do it best.
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.
~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:
- Obsessedwith pursuing the most asymmetric opportunities in AI.
- Technicalbuilders who ship with speed and intensity (at least one on the team).
- Hungryto 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
- 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.
2nd-time founder
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.
5th-time founder, previously backed by a16z & Bessemer
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.
2nd-time founder, previously backed by Lightspeed & Canaan
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).
2nd-time founder
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
How we invest
At focal, we:
- Match the speed and intensity of those we back.
- Run a high speed, high touch process that's almost always completed in a matter of days.
- Invest out of our 2nd fund with the majority of our capital going into our 1st check to lead or co-lead your 1st round.
- Are the most founder-aligned VC on the cap table given our early entry point / concentrated fund model - a role we cherish.
- Hold reserves to continue to invest in our top performers. Plus, for breakout companies, we can raise multi-$M co-investment vehicles from our institutional LP base.
Our regular check size is $500K - $1M+, though there's wiggle room on either side.
Typically < 7 days, centered around speed & conviction
- 01One GP conducts 1-3 meetings to gain initial conviction.
- 02Deep diligence with both GPs / decision makers at the firm (Daniel & Pascal).
- 03Mutual reference calls (personal / professional) incl. you with focal founders.
- 04An in-person meeting, where we come to see you.
We invest via the standard YC post-money SAFE with a standardized side letter.
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 and tech & AI led by Amine Afia.
An AI native venture firm
We’re building focal like the companies we back at the cutting edge.
Our firm is a learning system with an autonomous sourcing engine that quantifies every signal we can reach; agent swarms and rankers trained on every decision we make; a self-improving codebase that lets us build our own harness, tailored to our needs, and increase our velocity with each step the frontier does, and MUCH more.
Meaning we treat the firm itself as the model: Every signal is an input, every decision is a label, every outcome is a delayed reward, and the humans are the part of the loop that still sees what the data can't. The firm gets better with every decision, every new data source and every model release, on a self-improving codebase.
In charge of this is Amine who's an exited technical founder with an AI infra background.
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, Pascal, and Amine