Ault Krug Ventures

We met and became friends in early 2015, when Henry asked Joey — who had just done the first ICO on Ethereum -- for advice on how to do his own crowdsale, which was the third or fourth in the space.

We’d find ourselves talking nonstop about different startup ideas and business models we found intriguing, and would have founded had we had more time. In late 2015 we founded our AngelList syndicate to invest in companies pursuing such ideas. Our natural interest means we get very involved — at least as much as the founder wants us to be! We help founders with fundraising, selling, hiring, and technical challenges in a much more hands on way than most firms, especially towards the beginning of a company’s life cycle. Our goal is for the founder to notice a material difference once we once start working together. We know, *everybody* says this — and most don’t deliver — but we really mean it. Ask our founders.

We’ve since grown the syndicate to several hundred backers and have deployed over $3MM, with realized returns of over 7x. We invest anywhere between $100k and $1MM, with an average of $300k, into companies of all stages. That said, we typically find ourselves investing pre-seed, before the company has achieved product-market fit. We love helping founders clarify their vision and direction, and equally importantly, how to communicate them.

We’re incredibly people driven (especially for early-stage), provided the market they’re attacking is new, or if the solution in question would obviously represent a 10x improvement provided proper execution (and a little luck!). We value authenticity and curiosity in our founders beyond all else. They just had to found the company they did, for motivations unique to them. We don’t know anybody quite like them. The other major thing we look for early is openness to feedback, ability to learn quickly, and ability to execute ruthlessly.

If the above checks out, we’re willing to put in the time, even if all the ‘big names’ have passed, or the founder is unpolished and not privy to how the valley works. As founders progress, we work closely with several top-tier funds whom we can connect our founders with.

While we’re pretty sector agnostic, some of the areas we’ve invested in the past include fintech, biotech, healthcare, crowdsourcing, food automation, and traditional SaaS. One thesis we’ve been investing a lot in lately is in off-the-shelf hardware products that utilize advanced software techniques to provide valuable services at a far lower cost than custom hardware, which is notoriously expensive to scale.

Are you an early stage founder, or a VC who wants to connect with us? Shoot us an email at: contact@aultkrug.com

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