Anorak Ventures is a seed-stage venture firm founded in 2016, with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It invests in pre-seed and seed-stage companies building differentiated technology, helping them find product-market fit and follow-on financing. The firm's own pitch is unusually personal: it says it invests in "Anoraks" — founders with an obsessive, niche expertise the partners believe gives their companies an edge. Per its website, Anorak has backed more than 120 seed-stage technology companies that now represent an aggregate market capitalisation of $125 billion.
Thesis
Anorak targets frontier technology: virtual and augmented reality, computer vision, robotics, autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence — technically demanding areas where specialised founding teams solve problems others cannot. Founder Greg Castle was a seed investor in Oculus, present at the birth of the company that reignited VR, and built Anorak around the same pattern-recognition: highly specialised teams solving hard problems that could bring emerging technologies to the masses. As TechCrunch described the firm in 2020, it is "a small seed-investment firm that bets on emerging tech like AR/VR, machine learning and robotics."
Fund size and stages
Castle announced a $12 million Anorak Ventures fund focused on frontier technologies in 2023 (reported by UploadVR), writing early cheques in the pre-seed to seed range — typically a few hundred thousand dollars up to around $2 million, per third-party fund data. The firm also participates in select Series A rounds. Its current fund size beyond the announced vehicle is not publicly disclosed.
Notable portfolio
The defining bet is Oculus, backed at seed stage before Facebook's $2 billion acquisition. Other bets TechCrunch has reported include Against Gravity, 6D.ai and defence-tech company Anduril. The firm's site highlights Heaviside Industries, which announced a $60 million Series B led by Felicis. Additional investments recorded in deal databases include ZeroTier, Mermaid Chart, Irrigreen, AstroBeam, RagaAI, Magma, TRL11, Prisms of Reality, Vinci Games and Birdstop. Castle has said he has invested in more than 80 seed-stage companies, five of which have crossed a billion dollars in value (reported by dot.LA).
Partners
Greg Castle is the firm's managing partner and founding investor — an entrepreneur and corporate marketer turned angel investor whose early Oculus bet (via the company's Kickstarter-era fundraise) made him one of VR's first believers. Anorak operates as a boutique, partner-led shop: small team, high-touch, with Castle's network across VR/AR, robotics and LA's deep-tech scene as the central asset.
Programmes and perks
Anorak runs no public accelerator, fellowship or credits programme. Its founder support is hands-on and deliberately old-school: help finding product-market fit, introductions for follow-on financing, and a partner who has sat through multiple frontier-tech cycles and their winters.
Why it matters for founders
Anorak Ventures is a specialist worth knowing if you are building in VR/AR, robotics, computer vision or autonomous systems — areas where generalist seed funds often lack the technical patience. Greg Castle backed Oculus at seed and has ridden the frontier-tech cycle for a decade; his cheques are small but his conviction is the product. For deep-tech founders, a partner who understands hard problems beats a larger fund that doesn't.