Work-Bench is a New York City venture capital firm that invests exclusively in early-stage enterprise software. Founded in 2013 by Jonathan Lehr and Jessica Lin, the firm writes the first institutional cheque for conviction-driven founders, leading pre-seed and seed rounds with a deliberate New York bias. The partners started the firm on the belief that New York would become one of the best places in the world to build enterprise companies — and have spent more than a decade turning that belief into a thesis-driven seed franchise.
Investment thesis: GTM is your moat. Work-Bench's central conviction is that a great product is not enough — the companies that win understand their customers better than anyone else and turn that understanding into distribution. From day one, the firm works alongside founders to build it: finding the first customers, sharpening the motion, hiring the team, and scaling from seed through exit. The playbook began with a distinctive approach — validating Fortune 500 IT pain points through a deep corporate network first, then investing in the companies addressing them — which lets Work-Bench gain conviction in founders before they have the metrics other firms require.
Sectors and stages: the firm backs the founders building the next generation of applied AI and infrastructure software, including AI and machine learning, cybersecurity, infrastructure and developer tools, and vertical and horizontal enterprise applications. It invests at pre-seed and seed, with Fund IV targeting seed investments of $2m to $4m. Historically, the majority of its investments have been in New York-based startups.
Fund size: the firm's funds have been announced publicly. Fund IV closed at $160 million in May 2025, following Fund III ($100 million, 2021), Fund II ($47 million, 2018) and a $10 million debut fund.
Notable portfolio companies: Work-Bench's homepage showcases Dialpad (now Series F), Spring Health (Series E), Socure (Series E), Goodfire (Series B) and GovWell (Series A). Earlier standouts reported by TechCrunch include Cockroach Labs, Catalyst and FireHydrant, while CoreOS — acquired by Red Hat for $250 million in 2018 — stands as one of the firm's signature exits.
Partners: the firm is led by General Partners Jonathan Lehr, Jessica Lin and Kelley Mak.
Programmes and founder support: Work-Bench is known for hands-on, go-to-market support rather than capital alone. Founders get the GTM Weekly newsletter of battle-tested playbooks for discovery calls, outbound sequences and pricing discovery; guidance through procurement, security reviews, SOC 2, POCs and MSAs; introductions to a community of Fortune 500 buyers, operators and design partners; help closing engineering, product, sales and growth hires in New York; Series A raise guidance; and a steady cadence of community events — meetups, operator dinners and founder networking designed to help builders find co-founders and early customers.
Why it matters for founders
If your biggest risk is distribution rather than technology — you can build the product, but enterprise buyers are the mountain — Work-Bench exists for exactly that climb. It writes the first institutional cheque before the metrics exist and opens doors into the Fortune 500 accounts that decide early enterprise fates. For founders building applied AI or infrastructure software who want to win customers in New York, few seed funds combine this level of go-to-market obsession with such a concentrated corporate network.