Founding Team

We look for a strong entrepreneur/founding team. For first time entrepreneurs your academic background and prior work experience would be one of the many considerations. The ability to span different aspects of the business and develop expertise in understanding not only the technology, but also the market and business model are crucial.

Concept/Idea

K9 ventures is partial to companies that are developing new technology or using technology to solve real problems. To build a successful company, the concept must be novel, it must provide a measurable benefit to customers and have a clear path to revenue.

Stage of Company

K9 Ventures invests in concept-stage (sub $100k investment) and seed-stage (sub $1M investment) companies. We are happy to syndicate deals with angels, angel groups or VCs to bring in additional capital and access to a larger network and resources for companies.

Capital Efficiency

We look for companies that can be highly capital efficient and know how to maximize the value of every dollar. We don’t invest in any business concepts that require large capital investments (manufacturing, retail, energy for example).

Value Add

We look for businesses where we understand your technology, market and business model and can help the entrepreneur/founding team add value in the early stages of the company.

Geography

We believe in being active investors and like to work closely with our portfolio companies in their early days. As a result, we restrict our investments to companies that are located in the San Francisco, Bay Area.