We Invest at the
People Stage
Exceptional early talent is the greatest leading indicator of a company’s potential.
Since 2017 our partners have backed or founded companies with over $1B of enterprise value. We’ve taken companies from napkin sketches to thriving businesses, hired world-class talent and raised capital from top-tier investors. From these experiences, we’ve learned how to identify great talent early, allowing us to lean in well before data, revenue, and sometimes even a deck.
We lead pre-seed rounds in founders who:
- Are magnets for top-tier talent
- Have the clear, pragmatic vision needed to build a world-changing company, and
- Are a ton of fun to be around
We blend the network of a top-tier fund with the value-add of your most impactful angel.
We tailor founder support to optimize for impact. We can be high touch, high energy, or write a check and get out of the way.
Your Partners For The Entire Journey
Since 2017 we have invested in or founded companies with over $1B of enterprise value. We have built engineering teams, shipped hardware and software, and raised hundreds of millions in venture capital. Our partners are in the prime of their career and bring the energy and empathy to help you realize your vision.
Mike Annunziata
Mike is a trusted advisor to founders and superconnector within the venture community. Since 2019, he's helped Also Capital portfolio companies raise over $250M in follow-on capital from Tier 1 venture investors and build early teams with track records of success at venture-backed companies like SpaceX, Palantir, Instacart, and LiveRamp. Mike brings a founder perspective to early-stage investing, often being the first call for founders to celebrate when things are going well and a steadfast supporter in the most challenging times. He spent the last 7 years as co-founder & CEO of Farther Farms--a Series B hardtech startup founded out of Cornell University's food science labs that has been featured in Fast Company, Food Dive, and Green Biz--which provides him a unique perspective into the founder experience.
Mike is a Board Member of Also Capital portfolio company Varda Space Industries and held prior roles as a Partner in the Caffeinated Capital Collective, a seed-stage venture fund backing exceptional technology founders and supported by Caffeinated Capital, a Senior Investment Analyst at the Cornell University Investment Office, and a Legal Analyst at Soros Fund Management. He holds a Bachelor’s in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, an MBA from Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, is a CFA Charterholder, and is an alum of First Round Capital's Dorm Room Fund where he helped build entrepreneurial communities on college campuses through mentoring of and investment in student-founded startups.
"Mike is a mix between West coast big ideas and East coast VC foundational finance." - Dave Ambrose, GP @ Bungalow Capital
Will Bruey
Will is the CEO and Co-founder of Varda Space Industries, the first company commercializing in-space manufacturing for earth-sized markets and backed by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Caffeinated Capital, and more.
Will started his career at SpaceX where he was a hardware engineer working on the Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft, before flying 8 flights to the ISS from mission control as the lead of the dragon spacecraft. He subsequently spent time at Bank of America as a Director of Global Equities Technology before founding Varda Space Industries in November of 2020 where he serves as CEO. Will is a co-founder of Also Capital and holds a BS in Applied Physics from Cornell, and Masters of Systems Engineering from Cornell. In his free time, he maintains and flies his Cozy Mark 4 experimental aircraft.
Colin Smith
Colin is on the founding team at Vast, a leading private space station developer backed by Stellar and Ripple co-founder, Jed McCaleb.
Vast is developing a super large diameter space station module capable of supporting four crew members, and the first space station capable of generating earth-like rotation gravity required and to combat the detrimental effects of weightlessness on the human body. Colin spent over a decade at SpaceX where he architected battery and actuation systems for the most powerful launch vehicle ever developed, Starship. He also led the propulsion components design team for the Crew Dragon spacecraft from concept through production and first human flight, which has now successfully flown 30 astronauts to the International Space Station. Previously, Colin worked on the United States' first full size autonomous humanoid robot, CHARLI. His research brought him into the world of other bio-inspired robots, concentrating on underwater and aerial analogs. He holds a Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Tech where he was granted two patents and produced eleven peer reviewed publications on smart materials and sensors, novel actuators, and robotics. He is grateful to have worked with Also Capital for the last four years.
Albert Dong
Albert is the CEO & Founder of Godling, a creative & fundraising studio that has helped companies & funds raise over $3B in the last 3 years.
Since 2016, Albert has built his reputation defining the new role of Creative in its ability to expedite the growth of early-stage startups & funds. He has worked with 100+ companies to launch new brands, products, and close successful fundraises. Concurrently with Godling, he built out the platform team of First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund as their Managing Partner, advised the portfolio & incubations of Wavemaker Partners as their Creative-in-Residence, and built the design team of Lafayette Square as they scaled from 7 to 90 people as their Director of Brand. Today, he serves as a Venture Partner for Also Capital and focuses his time working closely with a handful of inspiring founders to remove their fundraising roadblocks. Albert has made 30+ angel investments across sectors, primarily at pre-seed & seed, with a focus on consumer.
Judy Savitskaya
Judy is a cofounder of Biosphere, a seed stage startup tackling scale up in biomanufacturing.
She is also a board member at Homeworld, a non-profit created to promote early stage research on climate applications for cutting edge biotechnologies. She was previously an investor on the bio+health team at Andreessen Horowitz. At a16z, she worked with seed to Series B startups in therapeutics, bio tooling, and synthetic biology. Judy holds a PhD in bioengineering from UC Berkeley, where she was a Hertz and DOD fellow. Her scientific training is in computational and synthetic biology.
Jamie Cox
Jamie is the CEO & cofounder of Treecard, a climate fintech helping consumers fund decarbonisation.
With 350,000 accounts and growing, Treecard is aiming to become the leading consumer lifestyle product in the space, doing for sustainability what Calm has done for mental health. Treecard has raised $27M from leading fintech investors such as Valar Ventures. Previously, Jamie founded the AI-specific cloud platform Fluidstack which he has grown to $15M ARR and currently provides key training and inference infrastructure for several high profile AI labs. Before becoming a Thiel fellow he was studying at Oxford University.