Investor Profile: Chapter One

Chapter One is a Los Angeles-based venture firm founded by Jeff Morris Jr., the former vice president of product and revenue at Tinder, where he grew the app's annual recurring revenue from $20 million to $1.2 billion and made it the top-grossing app in the App Store. The firm calls itself the most product-obsessed venture firm, and that operator DNA shapes every cheque it writes.

Investment thesis. Chapter One invests in founders with immense, imaginative ambition, backing what it calls writers of prologues, not footnotes. It leads or co-leads at the earliest chapters, often before the first line is written, and stays on the masthead from seed to scale. Its support model is full-stack: a team of product-focused builders who work round the clock with founders on product, distribution, and company-building, an extension of Morris's own product-first conviction that crypto and frontier sectors need product thinkers, not just engineers.

Sectors and stages. The firm began as a web3 specialist. In December 2021 Morris closed a $40 million early-stage fund dedicated to web3 products and platforms, with a separate $20 million opportunity fund in the process of being raised, and was already making bets across DAO infrastructure, NFT experiences, and learn-to-earn games. Since then the mandate has broadened substantially: today's Chapter One invests across defense, finance, crypto, AI, and the physical world. The stage focus remains early, pre-seed to seed, with the firm backing founders before they have meaningful traction.

Fund size. Not publicly disclosed. Historical funds reported by TechCrunch include a debut $10 million fund raised largely through Morris's AngelList syndicate network, the $40 million 2021 web3 fund, and a $20 million opportunity fund that was in fundraising at the time of reporting. The firm's current assets under management are not stated on its website.

Notable portfolio companies. Current names on the firm's website include Mach Industries (defense manufacturing), Epirus (directed-energy defense systems), Mercury and Erebor (startup banking), Ondo (real-world assets onchain), Ether.fi and LayerZero (crypto infrastructure), Supabase, Together.ai, Helius, General Intuition, and Superhuman. Early breakout bets from Morris's scout and syndicate days include Dapper Labs, Compound Finance, The Graph, Dharma Labs, and Density, which went on to a $1.05 billion valuation.

Partners. Chapter One was built by Morris as a solo general partner, with early hires drawn from Facebook and Stripe. Unusually for a small fund, its investor base includes some of venture's biggest names: Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, and Bain Capital committed as limited partners to the 2021 fund, alongside personal investments from Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon.

Programs, credits and perks. Chapter One runs a scout program that feeds early deal flow into the firm, and Chapter One Daily, a publishing arm that gathers the firm's analyses, perspectives, and podcasts in one place, including web3 education content for developers. The firm does not advertise a formal startup credits or perks program; its stated value-add is hands-on product support from builders who have shipped at scale.