California

K9 Ventures

K9 Ventures, based in California, backs generalist startups at Pre-Seed, mostly leading rounds with checks from $250k to $1 million, including Lyft and Twilio.

Website LinkedIn X Portfolio Pitch page Team page

Entry stagePre-seed

Check size$250K to $1M

Leads roundsYes

FocusGeneralist

Latest fundn/a

Investing team1 peopleNo activity since Sep

Who you would pitch at K9 Ventures

1 person on the investing team, 1 of them partners who can make the call. Partners are listed first.

Manu KumarFounder, Chief FirestarterHe has a PhD from Stanford and previously founded SneakerLabs and iMeet.

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Writes $250K to $1M checks. Its smallest check is larger than 33% of firms in the atlas.

Bars: how many firms in the atlas report each band. Highlighted: this firm.

No recent activity since September 2026. Quiet does not mean closed.

Weekly count of activity updates. Activity is not a confirmed deal.

Before you pitch

Ownership target7-10%

Does not invest inWe want companies where the customers pay for using the product or service directly. In other words, “I deliver value to you, you pay me.” We don’t like three-way business models as at the stage we invest it’s impossible to tell a company will become the next Google or Facebook. As a corollary, we don’t invest in companies built on media, content, advertising. We typically only consider companies where the founding team is located in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is not a function of where K9 is located, but because we believe that there is something that happens in Silicon Valley, which cannot be easily replicated in other geographies. We welcome working with remote or distributed teams (a change in our thinking), but absolutely will not consider companies that plan to outsource the development of their core technology/product.