Investor Profile: January Ventures - Thesis, Cheque Size & How to Apply

January Ventures is a Boston pre-seed venture firm with a mission that is unusually blunt: replace the friends and family round. If you are asking how to get funding from January Ventures, you do not need a warm introduction, a pitch deck or revenue. You need ambition, tenacity and a business that uses software to transform a legacy industry. That open door is the point of the firm, which was built to rewrite who gets access to venture capital in the first place.

The firm was founded in 2018 by Maren Bannon and Jennifer Neundorfer, former entrepreneurs and Stanford business school classmates. It began life as Jane VC and was renamed January Ventures in 2020 to be more welcoming to women from all backgrounds. The firm invests in the United States and Europe, from its Boston base.

Thesis: founders of the future

January Ventures backs founders based on tenacity and ambition, not pedigree or who they know. Its central belief is that the founders of the next decade will look fundamentally different: more female, more diverse and more distributed.

The sector focus is business to business software that digitally transforms legacy industries, with particular attention to the future of work, health and climate, alongside fintech and digital health. The firm looks for outlier founders transforming traditional industries and processes, and it takes an institutional approach to pre-seed investing, meaning it leads or co-leads rounds and provides structured support rather than writing a passive angel cheque.

Fund size and cheque size

January Ventures closed a $21 million second fund in April 2022, its largest investment vehicle to date at that time, backed by investors including the Kapor Foundation, Bain Capital Ventures, Arlan Hamilton, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon. That fund writes cheques of $250,000 to $750,000 into early stage software companies. By that point the firm had backed 50 companies, 90 percent of which had a female founder, 54 percent a founder of colour, 42 percent an immigrant founder, and 30 percent a technical female co-founder or chief technology officer. Any fund raised after Fund II is not publicly disclosed.

Notable portfolio companies

The portfolio reflects the work, health and climate focus. Elektra Health works on menopause care, Sano Genetics on personalised genomics, Planet FWD on food and climate data, and The Stack World on a professional community for women.

Research and transparency

January Ventures is also known for its annual founder survey, one of the longest running surveys of early stage founders, which tracks sentiment, runway, hiring and the experience of underrepresented founders. The seventh annual survey drew 482 respondents, 37 percent women and 53 percent people of colour, and found founder optimism at its highest point in seven years, even as runway pressure rose.

How to apply for funding

Founders can pitch through the Pitch Us page on the firm's official website, january.ventures, where the firm states plainly that it will invest in exceptional founders before there is a product, customers or revenue. The process is a short survey, historically about two minutes, with no revenue, pitch deck or warm introduction required.