Cowboy Ventures: the Seed-Stage Firm That Named the Unicorn

The seed fund behind the word "unicorn"

Cowboy Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California, founded in 2012 by investor Aileen Lee. Before Cowboy, Lee spent 13 years as a partner at Kleiner Perkins. She is also the person who coined the term "unicorn": her 2013 TechCrunch essay, "Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups", gave the industry its name for startups valued above $1 billion.

Cowboy is deliberately a pure seed shop, purpose-built for partnering at pre-seed and seed. Roughly 90% of its investments are pre-product, with 100+ early-stage investments. It backs founders whose products "re-imagine" work and personal life in large, growing markets, usually leading seed rounds. In recent years the portfolio has skewed about 70% enterprise and 30% consumer.

Thesis and sectors

Cowboy is a generalist seed investor with deep roots in software: vertical SaaS, enterprise infrastructure, developer tools, big data, security, fintech of all kinds, AI-driven software, and new consumer opportunities. Healthcare is also a growing area of focus. Cowboy prefers pre-product teams — around 70% of its first cheques land before a product exists — backing founders with a unique insight into an important problem in a potentially large market.

Funds: $260M in one 2023 raise

In January 2023, Cowboy closed two new funds totalling $260 million: Cowboy Ventures Fund IV, a $140 million seed fund, and its first opportunity-type fund, the Mustang Fund, at $120 million for doubling down on breakout winners. That exceeded all the capital the firm had previously gathered — its earlier funds were sized at $40 million, $60 million and $95 million.

Landmark portfolio wins

The track record explains why LPs keep writing bigger cheques. Dollar Shave Club was acquired by Unilever in 2016 for a reported $1 billion. Guild Education, which Cowboy backed early, was valued at $4.4 billion in June 2022. Security and compliance platform Drata reached a $2 billion valuation when it raised $200 million in Series C funding in December 2022. Other bets include Vic.ai ($52 million Series C), Homebase (roughly $100 million raised), SVT Robotics ($25 million Series A in late 2021) and Tally Technologies.

Partners and programmes

The investment team is led by founder and managing partner Aileen Lee, alongside Jill Williams (a fintech specialist recruited from Anthemis), Amanda Robson (enterprise software and AI, from Norwest Venture Partners), and board partner Ted Wang, who joined in 2017. Beyond the firm, Lee co-founded All Raise in 2018, a collective of more than 30 venture capitalists working to increase the presence of women in venture capital. Roughly half of Cowboy's portfolio companies have been founded or co-founded by a woman, and about one-third by a person of colour.

For founders, the pitch is hands-on: strategising, recruiting, financial planning, storytelling, fundraising, coaching, and introductions through the Team Cowboy community of founders and operators. Founders from Drata, Sliderule, Guild Education and Arcol describe a partner that stays deeply involved from pre-seed through exit.