A Scout & Supportive Investment Fund by Susa Ventures
Since Susa Ventures’ inception almost ten years ago, we have been a generalist seed fund. While we believe in the value of specializing in a single category and understanding that category deeply, we believe even more in understanding many sectors and applying generalizable business lessons across many industries. And despite what you might read about the economy on Twitter these days, we see great opportunities everywhere!
While we’ve seed invested across many industries from day one, our early successes led to us spending most of our time in four key areas:
Each of these areas offers plenty of opportunities for building generational companies that change our world while creating great outcomes for founders, employees, and investors. However, as we started to think about Susa’s next decade, it was clear that spending most of our time on four areas meant that we would miss out on incredible founders building in other spaces. Which begged the question: what’s the best way to add Focus Area #5 (and #6, and #7…) over the next few years?
Our answer is Humba Ventures
Humba Ventures is a new fund managed by the Susa team. Its goals are to expand Susa’s investing horizons, work with more great founders and companies, learn from them, and share what we’ve learned across many categories during the past decade. We’re pursuing two key Humba Ventures initiatives to reach these goals: supportive investments and Susa Scouts.
Supportive investments
While Susa’s core fund typically invests $1M-$2.5M into $2M-$5M seed rounds, Humba invests $100–500K and is more agnostic on round size and stage.
Though not an exhaustive list, some of our areas of interest are below. For each area, we’ve provided a list of some sample companies we think are interesting. (Neither Humba nor Susa are investors in the majority of these companies.)
- Cybersecurity and Defense. Examples: LimaCharlie, Shift5, Anduril, Hadrian, Modern Intelligence.
- Crypto. Examples: CrocSwap, Synapse, Magic Eden, Blur
- Climate Tech. Examples: Watershed, Runwise, Treeswift, Solugen, AMP Robotics
- Robotics. Examples: Tortuga, Dusty Robotics, AIM Intelligent Machines, Dexterity.ai
- Entrepreneurial Empowerment. Examples: Karat Financial, Noodle, Creative Juice, Zendoor
- Energy. Examples: Last Energy, NuScale Power, Oklo Inc
- Education. Examples: Primer, Edia, Synthesis, Mentava, Rize Education
Susa Scouts
Susa Scouts are individuals who write angel checks on behalf of Susa Ventures. They are typically domain experts in their fields and are sought out by founders for their knowledge and networks. Our goal at Susa is to learn about new companies and sectors through a diverse group of people, and to share our resources with the companies they support.
We are already working with a few terrific scouts and are excited to add more as the program matures.
The fight against complacency
Startups evolve and grow over time, and it would be surprising if a startup’s Year 10 product was the same as its Year 1 product. We’ve always thought of Susa as a startup, and our product should also evolve. We strive to adapt to the shifting needs of founders and the emergence of high-impact sectors and business models. We’re excited to launch Humba Ventures publicly, and we’ll continue to develop new experiments that enable us to improve as investors while supporting ambitious founders working on important problems.
Leo and Team Susa
Announcing Humba Ventures was originally published in Susa Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.