Investor Profile: Pace Capital

Pace Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City, founded in 2019 by Chris Paik and Jordan Cooper. Paik joined venture from Thrive Capital, where he spent eight years as a general partner; the firm he built with Cooper is deliberately small, thesis-driven, and designed around deep conviction in a small number of companies.

The firm's name captures its investment thesis. As Paik explained on the 20VC podcast, pace is not a fetishisation of speed but an intentional rate of resource expenditure to achieve a distinct goal: the investor acts as a pacemaker, supporting founders without running the race for them. In practice that means a high-conviction, low-volume model. The firm makes very few investments per year, leads its financings, and commits fully to each portfolio company rather than scaling support through outsourced services. Pace targets around 20% ownership at entry and runs concentrated portfolios of roughly the high teens to low twenties companies per fund.

Pace is a generalist investor. It invests across sectors and layers of the stack — from consumer to enterprise software to developer infrastructure — backing whichever team and product feels uniquely compelling. Stage-wise it leads financings typically at Series A, occasionally at seed. The firm organises itself as an equal partnership, which Paik has said is deliberate: making partners equal owners sharpens accountability and helps attract talent before they are widely recognised.

Fund size is publicly stated: Fund I was $150 million and Fund II was $250 million, both figures discussed on the 20VC podcast, implying roughly $400 million in assets under management.

Notable portfolio companies, as listed on the firm's official website, include The Browser Company (acquired by Atlassian), creator-economy platform Patreon, AI model-runner Ollama, LLM routing layer OpenRouter, global payouts infrastructure Trolley (formerly Payment Rails), open-source zero-trust networking company NetBird, community software Discourse, open-source AI coding tools Cline and Comfy, sandbox infrastructure for AI agents Daytona, alt-app marketplace AltStore, and onchain developer platform StationLabs (acquired by Coinbase). The portfolio skews heavily toward developer tools, open-source software, and AI infrastructure — a signal of where the firm's current conviction sits.

Partners: the firm is led by co-founders and general partners Chris Paik and Jordan Cooper, who remain the core of the investing team.

Programs, credits, and perks: the firm runs no publicly listed founder programs, startup credits, or perks scheme; nothing of the kind appears on its official website.