Bowery Capital is a New York-based early-stage venture capital firm focused exclusively on business software. Founded in 2013, it backs founders who are modernising how business gets done through technology, investing at pre-seed and seed stage across B2B SaaS and marketplace businesses. Its own site states the strategy in four words of discipline: pre-seed and seed, B2B only, lead investor, SaaS and marketplaces.
The firm is led by General Partners Michael Brown and Loren Straub, and its public positioning is unusually narrow: it does not invest in consumer, hardware or deep tech. The thesis is that business software, sold to business buyers, is where repeatable early-stage outcomes are built — and that an investor who only does that can be genuinely useful to the founders it backs.
What differentiates Bowery is its Acceleration Team, an in-house operating group that portfolio companies can draw on. It covers four functions: a Growth team of go-to-market specialists who help founders reach product-market-sales fit; a Talent team that handles hiring, culture building and benefits; a Business Development team focused on pipeline generation, coaching, partnership development and direct customer introductions; and a Revenue Council, a dedicated advisory network of industry experts available for one-to-one conversations as companies scale.
Bowery's portfolio reads as a catalogue of B2B software niches. It led the pre-seed round of Harmonyze, an AI-first platform building agents for franchise operations, in a round of more than $2 million with participation from Focal.VC. It backed Select Star, the data-cataloguing startup, through its $15 million round in early 2023, and security startup Paladin Cloud, hardware-developer platform AllSpice, food-artisan platform Castiron and its $6 million seed round, and Elevate, the pre-tax benefits platform, through its $12 million Series A. Location-data startup StreetCred, a Bowery-backed company, was acquired by Snap.
The firm's total assets under management are not publicly disclosed. What is public is the operating model: a small, focused team that writes early cheques, leads rounds, and then works inside portfolio companies on the two things that kill most B2B startups — finding customers and hiring well.
Why it matters for founders
If you are building B2B software or a B2B marketplace and are raising a pre-seed or seed round, Bowery is a structurally well-matched target: it leads rounds, only invests in B2B, and its Acceleration Team exists precisely to help with early go-to-market and hiring. Come with a credible first-customers story, because that is the lens through which the firm evaluates everything.