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Shaping tomorrowwith vision and action.

We back visionaries and craft ventures that define what comes next.

Investing. Building. Advisory.

We write the first cheque.

ARBOR is a pre-seed and seed fund. Fund III closed at $240M in March. We lead the round, we take the board seat, and we hold for ten years, which is longer than most founders plan to stay.

We cannot show you returns, because at this stage nobody honestly can. What we can show you is what each of these companies looked like on the day we wired the money. That is the only thing a seed fund is really selling.

Fund III
$240M
First cheque
$500k to $3M
Target at seed
12%
Since 2014
47 companies

The book

We saw the tower when it was a lot.

Every building on this skyline was gravel behind a fence once. So was every company in the book. Look through the glass.

The city today, seen across the park, with one pane of glass held over the skyline. Inside the pane the towers are gone: cleared lots, cranes and a grain silo stand where they now are.
Halyard's tower today, and inside the pane, the same ground before it was built.

Halyard

Pre-seed · $600k · 2016

Port call optimisation

Two people, a spreadsheet, and one terminal in Rotterdam willing to run it for a month.

Pallas's tower today, and inside the pane, the same ground before it was built.

Pallas

Seed · $2.1M · 2018

Grid-scale battery dispatch

A dispatch model on a laptop in a leased warehouse bay, and no licence to sell power.

Kiln's tower today, and inside the pane, the same ground before it was built.

Kiln

Seed · $3.0M · 2020

Electrified industrial heat

A furnace that had run for forty hours and cracked on the forty-first.

Sable's tower today, and inside the pane, the same ground before it was built.

Sable

Seed · $1.4M · 2021

Freight insurance priced per voyage

Eleven customers, a claims model, and a letter from the regulator they had not opened.

The book, in full.

Halyard's tower on the skyline today, with a pane of glass held over it. Inside the pane, the same ground before the tower existed.

Halyard

$600k · 2016

Two people, a spreadsheet, and one terminal in Rotterdam willing to run it for a month.

We lead or we co-lead, and we write the cheque off one partner's conviction rather than a room's consensus. There is no investment committee to survive, because a committee has never once been early to anything.

Two meetings, then an answer inside ten working days. If it is no, you get the reason in writing, and it will be the real one. We reserve the same amount again for your next round and we tell you the number on day one.

The part nobody photographs.

A fund will show you the lot, and it will show you the tower. The eighteen months of scaffolding in between is where the company is actually decided, and it is the only stretch we are any use in. Here is the schedule, so you can hold us to it.

The same skyline with a pane of glass held over it. Inside the pane the towers are half-built: concrete frames, open floor plates, safety netting, and a row of tower cranes.
Pallas, halfway up. Not the lot, and not the tower. This is the stretch where a seed fund either earns its 12% or does not.

  1. Days 1 to 90

    Two of ours, in your office

    A partner and an operator, one day a week, at a desk rather than on a call. They leave when you stop finding them useful, and we have had founders end it in week six.

  2. Month 2

    The first ten hires

    We write the specs, sit in the loops, and make the calls to the people who are not looking. Your tenth hire sets the culture far more than your first, and it is usually the one nobody plans.

  3. Month 4

    The price list, once

    We rebuild it with your five largest accounts on the phone. Most seed companies are underpriced by roughly half and find out two years too late to fix it quietly.

  4. Month 12

    The memo we would present

    We write your Series A memo a year before you raise it, including the parts that do not work yet. You then have four quarters to make it true, which is the whole point of writing it early.

For founders who do not want our money.

Some companies are already funded, or profitable, or simply not for sale. We work with a handful of them each year on the same problems: pricing, the next ten hires, and what to do about the competitor everyone is nervous about.

It is $18,000 a month, three months minimum, and you can end it with two weeks' notice. We take no equity and no right of first refusal on your next round. If we decide we want to invest, we resign the engagement before we ask.

An advisor who is also angling to buy 12% of you is not an advisor. So we made it one or the other, in writing.

From the lot

What we wrote while it was still a lot.

Three pieces on the stretch nobody photographs: the lot, the stakes in the ground, and the four years before anybody can tell whether we were right.

  • An empty gravel lot at dusk, surveyor's stakes and string lines across it, one distant light

    A seed fund with nothing to show yet

    No exits, no marks, no IRR. What we can prove is where we were standing when there was nothing to see.

  • Steel reinforcement bars standing in a poured concrete foundation at night, lit by a work lamp

    We invest before there is anything to see

    The deck is not the company. Most of what we back does not photograph well for another four years.

  • A glass tower at night seen from below, a few windows lit amber, gravel and site hoarding in the foreground

    What a gravel lot tells you about a tower

    Every building you can name was this, and nobody wanted to look at it. The lot is where the decision was made.

Tell us what is not built yet.

No deck required for the first conversation. One paragraph on what you are making and who is already paying for it will do. We answer every note ourselves, and we answer inside a week.

Sable's tower on the skyline, with a pane of glass held over it. Inside the pane, the yard that stood there before the tower was built.

Sable, 2021, and the yard it was standing in when we wrote the cheque. Yours is not on this skyline yet. That is the only reason we are interested.

This form does not submit anywhere. ARBOR is a concept build, so please do not leave a real address.