Frequently Asked Questions

We invest broadly in enterprise software, which has grown to include enterprise services-as-software (i.e. services delivered by AI, not humans). However, we get excited any time we encounter visionary, execution-driven technical teams that are going after critical problems in large, overlooked markets. If that describes you, we’d love to have a chat — even if your company doesn’t fit neatly into a well-understood market category.

(Note: We do not invest in companies building consumer products/services, nor do we invest in anything related to cryptocurrency.)

If you want to get more familiar with our portfolio companies, you can find an overview here.

Every company’s journey is different, so we don’t have a one-sized-fits-all approach to assessing potential investments. We’ve led rounds in pre-revenue companies, and passed on companies with multiple millions in revenue.

The factors we consider include TAM/company upside, execution risk, founder dilution, stage, and check size. Generally speaking, the more mature your company is, the higher our expectations are for market traction, product development, team composition, sales motion, and so on. In most cases, we like to talk to your users and customers to get a better understanding of your product and market fit.

We also invest in companies where a preexisting market does not exist. In that case we look for exceptional outliers in a founding team, with a crisp vision and purpose for why an opportunity exists to create a new category.

The most critical element of success for a startup is the strength of its team. As part of our process, we like to take the time to get to know founders and build a relationship. When we invest, we take the time to work closely with you and your team for as many years as your startup journey takes, so it’s important that we form a rapport early on.

Some of the attributes we look for in founders include customer obsession, clarity of thought, and pursuit of excellence. While we certainly like to see strong revenue and business momentum, having a visionary founder (or founders) who is also a truly great leader at the helm can be an equally meaningful signal for success.

We spend our time and capital with a few companies and try to get involved early. This means anywhere from the inception stage to Series A when there is some product but PMF is not obvious. We write checks anywhere from $500,000 to $12 milion, often leading rounds.

In many cases, we work alongside founding teams by joining their boards. That said, we seldom take board seats in pre-seed companies as we believe companies at that stage operate the fastest without the encumbrance of a board.

Despite what you might see on social media, a company’s journey is rarely up-and-to-the-right without interruption. Many of today’s best companies went through difficult times and tough challenges early in their existence. Their founders navigated those moments of crisis and came through them stronger.

We believe that those founders benefitted from a genuine relationship of trust with their investors, who were able to offer them a patient ear and dedicated time and space to understand their business. In that spirit, we aspire to be the consigliere to our founding teams, acting as coach and mentor through the highs, the lows, the twists, and turns.

In keeping with that ethos of deepening both our fund allocation and our relationships with companies in our portfolio, we often continue to invest in follow-on rounds.

However, we would much rather you hear how we operate from some of the founders we work with…

Vertex Ventures US is an independent firm based in Palo Alto, CA with its own portfolio of investments, General Partners (investors), and Limited Partners (investors in our funds). VVUS is part of a global network of geographically dispersed, similarly independent funds that all share the name Vertex Ventures. While each of those independent funds has a different investment focus and geographic area, we all share Vertex Holdings — a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek — as an anchor investor.

Other Vertex funds include Vertex Ventures Israel, Vertex Ventures SEA and India, Vertex Growth, Vertex Ventures China, Vertex Healthcare, and Vertex Ventures Japan.