Capital doesn’t solve all problems, but it can be very helpful to accelerate, scale, and guarantee startup impact.
Urban Us Ventures
Invests in seed stage startups. We typically invest up to $250k prior to growth capital, commonly thought of as series A.
We’re most interested in the potential for impact at scale. Our portfolio reflects our interests, but here are some other problems that interest us.
Beyond the specific area of impact, we’re interested in companies that can have an impact on 100 cities within 5 years.
This means that we often spend a lot of time asking questions about the market or the problem domain. We’re big believers that the product and even the team may change, but it’s very hard to change the problem you care about.
We’re less interested in products than processes. We love to understand how teams get from ideas to prototypes or why they decide to make changes to channels or pricing.
Urban Us Capital
Sometimes, equity funding is not enough. We’re pioneering new types of investments, especially where we find startups that are creating new types of assets.
Software as a Service (SaaS) powers a new generation of software because it removes upfront costs for customers. This is what capital does for startups that use hardware as part of the services they delivery–capital allows startups to deliver the next general of infrastructure as a service.
We try to be agnostic about the type of capital. Our goal is always to see how we help startups scale impact more quickly, and we’ve found that traditional venture capital equity structures are just one way to do this.