Investor Profile: Alumni Ventures

Alumni Ventures (AV) is a US venture capital firm founded in 2014 by Mike Collins — formerly of TA Associates — and Luke Antal, and headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire. Its founding idea was to open venture capital to accredited individuals rather than only institutions and the ultra-wealthy: Collins raised the first $1.5 million from his fellow Dartmouth alumni for a fund called Green D Ventures, and the alumni-network model has been the firm's blueprint ever since.

The model works like this. Instead of raising a handful of large funds from pension funds and endowments, AV operates around 45 alumni-network funds that take a $10,000 minimum from each investor, alongside 10 Focused Funds and the AV Syndicate. Each alumni fund pools capital from accredited individuals — largely alumni of a specific university — into a diversified venture portfolio. The named university funds verified in independent coverage include Green D Ventures (Dartmouth), The Yard Ventures (Harvard), Spike Ventures (Stanford), Castor Ventures (MIT), Purple Arch Ventures (Northwestern) and Strawberry Creek Ventures (UC-Berkeley). One caveat for precision: independent reporting notes these funds are not formally affiliated with the universities whose names they echo.

AV is exclusively a co-investor. It does not lead financing rounds and it does not take board seats — a deliberate low-friction posture. That makes it a complementary check alongside lead investors rather than a round architect. Frequent co-investors named on the firm's own site include a16z, Sequoia, Khosla and Accel, and coverage also cites Benchmark, Greylock and Y Combinator. The pitch to founders is "smart, connected capital" plus access to a large network of investors and experts.

On sectors and stages, AV describes its portfolios as diversified across sectors, stages and geographies, covering both venture stage and late-stage private companies. The Focused Funds target individual themes such as health, sports and artificial intelligence, among others. For investors who prefer deal-by-deal participation, the AV Syndicate offers single-deal investing alongside the funds.

Scale is publicly stated. In June 2026 the firm said it had raised more than $1.4 billion, invested in more than 1,600 companies and gathered 11,000+ accredited investors; independent reporting puts assets under management at roughly $1.5 billion as of 2025. Ranked among the most active venture investors in the US, AV also opened its first European office in London in June 2026, launching AV UK's Global Alumni Syndicate — a private community for globally minded qualified investors, led from New York by Collins and from London by the UK team.

Notable portfolio companies cited in coverage include Groq, Rigetti Computing, Axiom Space, Oura Health, RapidSOS, Bluesky and Circle. Its EMEA and UK backing includes Oura Ring, Yassir, PolyAI and SurrealDB. The firm reports top-quartile performance for its 2016–2020 fund vintages on the DPI metric, while cautioning — as it must — that past performance guarantees nothing.

Leadership remains founder-led: Mike Collins is Chief Executive. AV does not publicly advertise a startup credits or perks programme of the cloud-credit kind; its value-add for founders is framed as network access, follow-on-friendly passive capital and investor-education programming on both sides of the Atlantic.