Investor Profile: Angular Ventures — Thesis, Cheque Size & How to Apply

Angular Ventures is an inception-stage venture capital firm headquartered in London, with additional hubs in Tel Aviv, New York and Palo Alto. Founded in 2018 by Gil Dibner, a former partner at DFJ Esprit, it invests in enterprise technology and deep tech, and it deliberately ignores geographic boundaries within its home region: what matters is that founders originate from Europe or Israel and plan to build for the United States market.

The thesis is sector-first, geography-second. Angular Ventures describes itself as an inception-stage fund that prefers to invest in a company's first institutional round and is often the first investor a company has. It says it is never too early — it regularly invests pre-revenue, pre-product, or even pre-company — and it looks for opinionated, contrarian founders with deep industry insight and genuine commercial instinct, not what it calls vibe companies or science projects.

On fund size, Angular Ventures closed its debut fund at $41 million in 2019, oversubscribed against its original target, and later raised an $80 million second fund to continue backing early-stage enterprise and deep-tech companies across Europe and Israel. Its first checks are usually between $500,000 and $5 million, and the firm is set up to follow on throughout a company's life. It typically leads or co-leads rounds, and says it is comfortable investing alone.

Notable portfolio companies from the first fund include Firebolt, the cloud data-warehouse company; Valohai, the machine-learning operations platform from Finland; Aquant, the service-intelligence platform for industrial machinery; Dust Identity, the nano-technology security company; Trellis, the food-supply-chain optimisation company; Candu, the customer-success platform; and Budibase, the low-code platform. Many of these went on to raise Series A rounds from leading US venture firms, which is exactly the trajectory the firm is built to create.

Angular Ventures also backs automation, industrial technology, infrastructure and developer tools — recent names include Groundcover, the cloud-native observability platform, Reco, the SaaS-security company, Levity, CruxOCM and Paradime. The firm says it has built a deep support platform to help portfolio companies accelerate, particularly around US go-to-market expansion, although it does not publish a startup credits or perks package, and founders should not assume one.

How to apply for funding

Angular Ventures does not run a public application form or a cohort programme; founders reach it through the contact route on its official website, angularventures.com, where it sets out how it invests. Because the firm invests at inception stage, a pitch does not need revenue or even a finished product — but it does need a clear enterprise or deep-tech insight, a credible reason the company will win in the US, and a founding team the firm can develop deep conviction in. First-time founders are explicitly welcome: the firm says it backs first-time founders who see the world differently as well as repeat founders.