25 HealthTech VC Firms in 2025 (and How to Apply for Funding)

The healthcare industry is undergoing a massive transformation, driven by innovations in AI, digital health, value-based care, and tech-enabled services. From streamlining patient experiences to optimizing provider workflows, startups are redefining how care is delivered, accessed, and paid for. But building in HealthTech isn’t just about having a great product—it’s about securing partnerships with payers and providers, navigating complex regulatory hurdles, and proving real-world impact. The right investors don’t just bring capital; they bring deep expertise, industry relationships, and the strategic guidance necessary to scale successfully.

That’s why we’ve put together this curated list of 25 top HealthTech venture capital firms actively investing in 2025. These VCs are backing digital health, healthcare SaaS, payer/provider solutions, virtual care, women’s health, end-of-life, and tech-enabled services. More importantly, we’ve detailed how to approach them, giving founders a direct path to securing funding from investors who understand the nuances of scaling in this space.

If you’re building the future of healthcare through technology and innovation, this list is your roadmap to the right investment partners.

Featured Investors: Leura Craig, Abbie Strabala, Deepika Jonnalagadda, and AJ Smith.

Outlander VC is a generalist fund that has been first or early money in multiple high-impact HealthTech companies. In Fund III, Outlander invests at pre-seed and seed, writing initial checks between $500K and $2.5M+. While the firm does not invest in biotech or pharmaceuticals, Outlander is bullish on transformative healthcare technology—backing AI, automation, and deep-tech solutions that redefine how care is delivered, accessed, and optimized.

Featured Investors: Anna Fagin, Robert Fuentes, Chris Gosioco, and Andie Steinberg

Highlighted Investments: Eleanor Health, Zing Health, Habitat Health, and Thyme Care

Town Hall Ventures seeks to partner with entrepreneurs who are as passionate as they are about changing the health care system. The fund is aiming to raise $400M for its fourth flagship fund, Town Hall Ventures IV and invests initial checks ranging from $5 to $25M across all stages.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors focused on deal sourcing listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Featured Investors: Lynne Chou O’Keefe, Chirag Shah, Hong Truong, and Chuka Esiobu

Define Ventures is one of the largest funds focused on early-stage health tech companies. Define supports companies from incubation to series B.

How to Apply: Reach out to anyone on the investor team – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Obvious Ventures was one of the first VC firms in the world to become a certified B Corp, and it has backed 100+ purpose-driven companies building transformative solutions to the systemic environmental and social challenges of our time. The firm’s three investment pillars are sustainable systems, healthy living and people power.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

FCA Venture Partners invests in digital health and technology enabled healthcare services companies across the seed to series B stages writing checks from $2-6M.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

F Prime Capital, the CVC of Fidelity Investments, is a global venture capital firm that invests in seed through growth stage technology and healthcare companies, focusing on innovation and disruptive growth.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Featured Investors: Bob Kocher, Camille Samuels, Nick Beim, Ethan Batraski
Highlighted Investments: Athenahealth, Devoted Health, Lyra Health, 10x Genomics

Venrock has been a powerhouse in healthcare and technology investing for over 50 years, with deep roots in healthcare IT, biotech, and tech-enabled services. They invest early and at growth stages, with a strong focus on value-based care, digital health, and enterprise SaaS for healthcare.

How to Apply: Reach out to their investment team through referrals. Learn more on their website.

Featured Investors: Glen Bressner, Todd Pietri, Jarred Bressner, and Pierce Crowley

Activate Venture Partners has invested in over 100 tech-enabled healthcare and applied technology companies at the seed and early stage.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Contact form on their website.

NEA has served as a partner to the founders and teams behind some of the most transformational innovations in healthcare and technology from early seed to the growth stage over the past five decades.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

CVS Health Ventures is a corporate venture capital fund that invests in high-potential, early-stage and growth-stage companies focused on making healthcare more accessible, affordable, and simpler.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in early stage healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Fill out the contact form on their website.

Highlighted Investments: Cityblock, Main Street Health, Upfront Healthcare, Eleanor Health

Echo Health Ventures invests in early to late stage healthcare companies. They have 30+ companies in their current portfolio.

How to Apply: Reach out to any member of the investment team – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Featured Investors: Bill Geary, Victor Lanio, Margaret Malone, and Tara Sullivan

Flare Capital Partners is an early-stage healthcare venture capital firm advancing innovation-driven companies to improve positive health outcomes, broaden care access, and lower healthcare costs.

How to Apply: Reach out to any member of their investment team – network referrals work best. Reach out on their website.

B Capital is a multi-stage investment firm supporting a startup’s unique needs throughout the journey from seed to market leadership. Within healthcare, they are focused on healthcare IT & SaaS, digital healthcare, biotechnology and bio IT, and healthcare insurance and payment.

How to Apply: Reach out to a member of the healthtech investment team listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Featured Investors: Matthew Harrigan, Nelson Schubart, Margaret Davidson, and Hunter Hillenmeyer

Company Ventures predominantly invests in digital health, fintech and enterprise SaaS businesses at pre-seed, seed and series A stages through our funds with a typical check size of ~$500K-$1M.

How to Apply: Reach out to any member of their investment team – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Amboy Street Ventures invests in Seed and Series A stages of cutting-edge Women’s Health and Sexual Health startups that address this untapped $1T market opportunity.

How to Apply: Reach out to any member of their investment team – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Highlighted Investments: Seen Health, Carewell, Isaac Health, and Safe Ride Health

Primetime Partners is a leading investor in longevity tech, across healthcare, fintech and consumer. The fund invests in seed stage as well as opportunistic series A companies.

How to Apply: Reach out to any member of their investment team – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

AlleyCorp Healthcare is one of the most active early-stage investors in New York dedicated to healthcare. As a physician-led team, they build and invest $1-4M entry checks in companies that dramatically improve healthcare across quality, cost, and access from incubation through seed.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Route 66 Ventures is focused on the Digital Health & Wellness market, investing in early stage idea-driven, technology companies that will change the world in positive ways and impact people’s lives.

How to Apply: Reach out to anyone on the investment team – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Primary Ventures is a generalist fund writing checks ranging from $1-6M into NYC-based seed companies. Primary’s impact team actively works alongside portfolio companies to boost their growth by providing deep operational support.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Featured Investors: Mike Cunningham, George Pantazopoulos, Richie Chaikof, and Courtney Good

Optum Ventures, a CVC of UnitedHealth Group, invests from seed to growth equity with a mission to promote healthcare innovation across the globe. Their 70+ portfolio companies include value-based care delivery, enterprise software and enabling infrastructure, and fintech, among others.

How to Apply: How to Apply: Reach out to any member of their investment team – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Zeal Capital is a Washington, DC-based venture capital fund investing in healthcare, fintech, and the future of work and learning at the seed and series A. Zeal leverages its Inclusive Investing strategy to narrow wealth, skills, and healthcare gaps in the US, and at scale globally.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Featured Investors: Linnea Roberts, Ita Ekpoudom, Katherine Rice, and Elizabeth Valiaveedan

GingerBread Capital invests $150K-$2M+ in the next generation of women founders and entrepreneurs leading high-growth businesses from seed through series C. The fund has an investment focus in companies impacting women’s health.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

Featured Investors: Bob Saunders, Michelle Cao, Sarah Manasvit, and Jagoda Rokicka

Highlighted Investments: Amplified Sciences, eBlu Solutions, mPulse Mobile, and Progentec

OCA Ventures invests in seed through series B companies in enterprise software, consumer software, fintech, and digital health with initial check sizes of $1-3M.

How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Fill out the form on their website.

Lux Capital is known for backing bold, frontier-tech companies pushing the boundaries of healthcare, biotech, and deep science. The firm invests across seed to growth stages, with a focus on startups leveraging AI, robotics, and next-gen therapeutics to reshape the healthcare landscape.

Lightspeed backs founders early and supports from seed through Series F and beyond.
How to Apply: Reach out to the investors specializing in healthtech listed above – network referrals work best. Learn more on their website.

The Rise of Women-Led VC Firms in 2024

Despite the long-documented gender gap in funding female* founders, there is good news for the ecosystem in the recent rise in women-led venture capital (VC) firms.

In 2023, women-led VC firms raised a record $3.5B in 2023 (up $500M from 2022). This still only accounts for roughly 3% of all venture funding raised in 2023, but represents a significantly promising step for the entire startup ecosystem.

Especially because the indication thus far is that women-led funds are more likely to invest in diverse founders, which research indicates actually correlates with better financial performance.

Here are some quick facts regarding female* founded companies for your next pitch:

We’ve put together a short list of 24 incredible women-led VC firms (24 for ’24!) that should absolutely be on your radar. There are many more, so be sure to tag them on our LinkedIn post to help more female* founders find great investors!

24 Top Women-Led VC Firms in 2024 and How to Apply for Funding

Outlander VC

Featured Partners: Leura Craig and Bailie Salk
Highlighted Investments: Gusto, Lyft, Klarna, Wish, Scale, Andela, Postmates

Outlander VC is a leading venture capital firm with a remarkable track record, including 17+ unicorns among its ~150 portfolio companies. Under the leadership of Leura Craig, Outlander has become a top-decile performer and is actively deploying capital from its third fund. The firm is notable for its commitment to diversity, with half of its investment partners being women and 62% of its portfolio having diverse founders.

BBG Ventures

Featured Partners: Susan Lyne, Nishua Dua
Highlighted Investments: Zola, The Mom Project, Lola, Winky Lux, Oova

BBG Ventures, under the leadership of Susan Lyne and Nishua Dua, invests in early-stage startups with at least one female founder. They are on Fund IV and actively hearing founder pitches.

Acrew Capital

Featured Partners: Theresia Gouw, Lauren Kolodny
Highlighted Investments: Bilt, Gusto, Chime, Clara, Discord

Acrew Capital is a powerhouse in early-stage venture investing, led by Theresia Gouw and Lauren Kolodny. The firm is known for its strategic investments in fintech, cybersecurity, and consumer tech, driven by a leadership team that brings a wealth of experience and a commitment to diversity.

Cowboy Ventures

Featured Partner: Aileen Lee
Highlighted Investments: Docsend, The League, Crunchbase, Enrich, Guild

Cowboy Ventures, led by Aileen Lee, is known for its strategic investments in software-focused startups. Aileen Lee’s experience and leadership have made Cowboy Ventures a key player in the early-stage venture capital arena.

Female Founders Fund

Featured Partner: Anu Duggal
Highlighted Investments: Zola, Bentobox, Wayup, Winky Lux, Fable

Female Founders Fund, led by Anu Duggal, is a leading source of capital for women entrepreneurs. The firm’s investments span a variety of sectors, all united by their focus on female leadership and innovation.

The Artemis Fund

Featured Partner: Leslie Goldman Tepper
Highlighted Investments: DressX, Fundid, The Good Patch

The Artemis Fund is a seed-stage fund focused on tech startups in fintech, commerce, and care sectors. Leslie Goldman Tepper’s leadership has positioned the firm as a key player in supporting diverse founders who are building the next generation of transformative companies.

Aspect Ventures

Featured Partners: Theresia Gouw, Jennifer Scott Fonstad
Highlighted Investments: Baublebar, Gusto, HotelTonight, TheRealReal

Aspect Ventures is a Series A-focused (selected seed participation) firm whose team has funded over 100 companies and participated in 350+ follow-on investments.

Construct Capital

Featured Partners: Dayna Grayson, Rachel Holt
Highlighted Investments: Uber, Copia, Incremental, Verve, Telegraph

Construct Capital, co-led by Dayna Grayson and Rachel Holt, focuses on early-stage investments in industries like manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain. The firm’s leadership team brings deep expertise to their investments, driving innovation in these foundational sectors.

Forerunner Ventures

Featured Partner: Kirsten Green
Highlighted Investments: The Farmer’s Dog, Chime, Ritual, him&hers, Oura, Glossier

Forerunner Ventures, under the leadership of Kirsten Green, specializes in investments in e-commerce and consumer brands.

Renegade Partners

Featured Partner: Roseanne Wincek & Renata Quintini
Highlighted Investments: Warby Parker, Masterclass, Dollar Shave Club

Renegade focuses on early-stage investments in AI/ML, Vertical SaaS, Enterprise, Consumer, FinTech, InfraTech, and more.

How to Apply: Check their website for updates on investment opportunities or reach out directly through their contact page.

Union Square Ventures

Featured Partner: Rebecca Kaden
Highlighted Investments: Etsy, Twitter, Duolingo, Coinbase, Kickstarter
Union Square Ventures is a NYC-based VC, investing on the edge of large markets being transformed by technological and societal pressures.

How to Apply: Union Square Ventures prefers warm introductions, but they are also receptive to pitches sent via email (see website footer).

Redpoint Ventures

Featured Partner: Annie Kadavy
Highlighted Investments: Stripe, Snowflake, HashiCorp, Nubank
Redpoint invests across consumer and enterprise and they have partnered with thousands of inspiring entrepreneurs over the past two decades.

How to Apply: Redpoint Ventures accepts warm introductions, but you can also reach out via their website.

Revolution Ventures

Featured Partner: Clara Sieg
Highlighted Investments: sweetgreen, DraftKings, TemperPack, Scopely
Revolution Ventures, HQ’d in Washington, D.C., invests in companies outside traditional tech hubs through their family of funds – Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Revolution Ventures, and Revolution Growth – Revolution partners with entrepreneurs at every stage of the entrepreneurial lifecycle.

Bond Capital

Featured Partner: Mary Meeker
Highlighted Investments: Canva, AirBnb, Doordash, Duolingo, Instacart, Clear, Peloton
Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital specializes in late-stage growth investments in high-potential companies, particularly those leveraging technology to scale rapidly.
How to Apply: The best approach is through a network referral!

Pear VC

Featured Partner: Mar Hershenson
Highlighted Investments: DoorDash, Gusto, Branch, Guardant Health
Pear VC is a seed-stage venture firm led by Mar Hershenson and Pejman Nozad, focusing on partnering with founders from the earliest stages of their journey.
How to Apply: Pear VC encourages founders to connect via their online application form.

Alpaca VC

Featured Partner: Aubrie Pagano
Highlighted Investments: Compass, Firstbase, Animoca, Classpass, Imperfect Foods
Alpaca VC, led by Aubrie Pagano, invests in companies reshaping the built world, leading rounds in real estate and commerce.
How to Apply: Send them an email (Listed in their footer)

Baukunst

Featured Partner: Kate McAndrew
Highlighted Investments: Figma, Notion, Clubhouse, Threads
Kate McAndrew leads Baukunst, a venture firm that invests in creators, builders, and entrepreneurs with a focus on creative and impactful technology & design.
How to Apply: Network introductions work best, but you can also reach out via email (see website footer)

Greycroft

Featured Partner: Dana Settle
Highlighted Investments: Venmo, Scopely, TheRealReal, Braintree, Boxed, Bumble

Greycroft focuses on early to growth-stage investments in technology companies across the globe with the potential to transform sectors.

How to Apply: Network introductions work best!

NextView Ventures

Highlighted Investments: Grove Collaborative, ThredUp, Skillshare, Whoop, Attentive

NextView makes initial pre-seed & seed stage investments (checks between $400k – $4m) into software and AI companies redesigning the everyday economy.

How to Apply: The best way to get in touch is through a referral, but you can also contact through their website!

Cake Ventures

Cake Ventures invests in pre-seed & seed stage companies that reflect demographic change: aging & longevity, increased spending power of women, and the shift to majority-minority.

Halogen Ventures

Featured Partner: Jesse Draper
Highlighted Investments: Everlywell, Inked, Metropolis, Live Tinted

Halogen Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund investing in consumer technology companies led by women and based in Los Angeles.

Rivet Ventures

Featured Partner: Shadi Mehraein, Rebeca Hwang, Christina Brodbeck
Highlighted Investments: Athena, Honeybook, Ritual, Mayvenn

Rivet Ventures invests in companies where women are the key consumer demographic, focusing on companies with products or services that cater to women’s needs.

Spero Ventures

Spero Ventures invests in founders building mission-driven technology companies in three focus areas: wellbeing; sustainability; learning, work, and play. They prefer to lead or co-lead a $3M-$10M round (late seed or Series A), typically writing checks from $2M – $4M.

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Mercedes joined us a couple months ago for one of our most highly-attended Venture Visionary interviews. Lightspeed has added multiple female investing partners in the last few years. They love backing founders early and support from seed through Series F and beyond.

As your business grows, hiring a team to turn your vision into reality creates an inevitable founder dilemma: how do you find top-tier candidates and inspire them to join you? How can you effectively screen for rockstar candidates at scale? And once you’ve assembled your dream team, how do you keep them inspired by your vision long-term?

Luckily, we hosted former SVP of Ziprecruiter and people expert Kevin Gaither for an Outlandish Speaker Series, where he shared his tried-and-true recruitment best practices and lessons from his mistakes along the way.

Recruitment Dos + Don’ts

From his time at multiple early-stage companies to growing Ziprecruiters’ sales team from 1-500+ employees, Kevin likens recruitment to dating. So, regardless of your recruitment method, keep “swiping right” until you find a candidate who excites you, avoid trying to force a fit, and beware of settling because you’re tired of looking!

Here are a few key aspects to always consider when evaluating potential matches:

✅ Define what great means.

Before you start swiping, understand what a “great” fit for this position means in quantifiable ways. First, think of your ideal candidate, then make a list of the specific characteristics, experiences, skills, etc., that will help them succeed in the role

✅ Create benchmarks and systems for evaluating employees.

Now that you’ve outlined your ideal candidate, it’s time to date! While interviewing, evaluate your potential hires against your ideal candidate. Using your ideal candidate as a rubric will enable you to screen and rank potential hires efficiently and effectively at scale.

🛑 Try cloning a top performer.

When looking to expand a team, searching for a clone of already existing team members is a mistake. Using a real person as your screening rubric often leads to dead ends and potentially overlooking even better talent from a different background. Instead, reflect on what characteristics, experiences, skills, etc., enabled your top performers to succeed in their roles, then evaluate which potential hires share those qualities.

🛑 Force yourself into liking a candidate.

If recruitment is like dating, hiring is like marriage. In both arenas, Kevin’s advice is the same: don’t take the plunge unless it’s love! In HR-compliant terms, don’t settle for a candidate that doesn’t excite you. If a potential hire requires extensive internal convincing, they probably are not the best fit for the job.

Retention Dos + Don’ts

After finding a rockstar candidate, it’s time to put a ring on it! The hiring process is arduous and time-consuming, so retaining your dream team is a top priority.

From the day they enter the office to their promotion to high-level management, it’s essential to create the best possible environment for employees to keep them inspired long term.

✅ Prioritize onboarding.

From the first day on the job, employees should have explicit schedules with proper training in all aspects of the business with clear delineations of how their role fits into the puzzle. New employees are not set up to succeed without adequate onboarding, which will inevitably upset the balance of their teammates, too. After the strategic decision to hire a top-tier candidate, avoid the tactical mistake of poor onboarding at all costs.

✅ Set clear expectations.

In order to both motivate and provide security for employees, it is essential to have clear expectations on goals, firing thresholds, and company culture norms. Likewise, employees expect their performance to be reflected in promotions and pay raises. So, setting clear, quantifiable benchmarks—via sales numbers or other measurable metrics—allows them to run towards concrete goals from day one.

🛑 Prioritize results > culture.

Prioritizing performance alone sends the implicit message that it’s every person for themselves—quickly killing team-wide collaboration and individual motivation. Success at the expense of company culture is a sure-fire way to lose rockstar employees to companies led by more empathetic leaders who value their high-performing employees as human beings, too.

🛑 Jump straight to firing employees.

While it’s sometimes inevitable, firing talent should be a last resort. Get curious about why your rockstar candidate is falling short. If they looked so good on paper, what is getting in the way of their success under your leadership? In the interim, finding different roles for struggling employees should be the goal of managers.

Organize for culture

The team you hire will directly impact your startup’s capacity to adapt and grow, so being thoughtful from recruitment through retention should be a high priority for founding teams. And as your company grows, you must build recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and employee retention processes that can scale with your organization and set each team member up to succeed in executing your vision.

The tools Kevin Gaither amassed through years of experience provide a vetted framework. Still, the specifics on how you execute these Dos and Don’ts will vary based on your company’s specific context and experiences—just like dating!

For more expert advice on building and scaling your startup, check out our event library and Field Notes.

The pandemic changed how we do business, pushing sales teams to adapt to new, more virtual-than-ever strategies for reaching customers. Before the pandemic, many companies nurtured leads in person through dinners, meetings, events, etc. Now, the #1 sales and marketing asset for your business is its website because, in a virtual-first world, your company’s website is your new storefront.

Challenges of a Virtual Storefront

First, invest in your website early to set your sales team up for success. Aside from curbside appeal, your website must reflect your vision via engaging content that is easy to navigate and drives users to connect with you further.

Website conversions are down from 10% in 2010 to <1% in 2022. The pandemic expedited the shift to virtual-first shopping, which has impacted consumer activity, too. First, users are less willing to give up their personal information. Second, converting virtual leads poses unique challenges:

Response time is critical, but so is replicating the personal touch of traditional sales strategies. As with in-person sales strategies, you need to understand: Which user in the market to buy? How do we engage with each user in a personalized way? How do we meet users with buyer intent at the exact moment they want to talk to you?

The challenges of your virtual storefront will require tools for tracking prospects on and off your website.

Optimizing a Virtual Storefront

You will drive potential customers to your website through a variety of marketing and sales campaigns, including paid ads, outbound sequences, SEO, review sites, social media, event promotions, and email marketing. Using UTM tracking tools, Google Analytics, or a pipeline generation tool like Qualified, you can track the highest-performing sources of inbound traffic and personalize subsequent marketing touchpoints to a greater degree.

For example, here’s how Qualified customers increase the >1% web conversion rate to +25% through their pipeline cloud:

Tracking user behaviors throughout your sales funnel will enable you to identify and assess bottlenecks or leaks hindering your conversion rates, such as willingness to pay, competitive price points, when users ghost reps, time from the first touchpoint to closed-won, customer sources, and more. Then, the next step in your sales playbook is segmenting your accounts, pricing, and packaging to create a repeatable, competitive funnel.

Outlandish Sales 101 x Eric Sikola

A strong sales strategy sets the foundation for every successful sales organization. Ideally, it should focus the team around a set of shared goals, enable the team to build trusted relationships with customers, and ultimately drive more pipeline and revenue. Nobody knows this better than Eric Sikola, President and Chief Operating Officer of Qualified.

With 20+ years of enterprise software and SaaS experience, Eric knows what works. Watch the replay of his Outlandish Sales 101 session for his tried-and-true selling strategies and best practices for startups so you can convert more leads than ever before.

This Field Guide is a synopsis of the first half of Eric Sikola’s 45-minute Outlandish Sales 101 presentation. Click here to view the entire presentation and audience Q&A, and access the deck!

For more expert advice on building and scaling your startup, check out our event library and Field Notes.

The consumer packaged goods (CPG) market is massive, expanding, and becoming more and more distributed—with new players stepping into the ring every day. The $2 trillion industry encompasses the food, beverage, household, and personal care products consumers rely on habitually, making brand loyalty the cornerstone of successful CPG brands.

Brand loyalty vs. digital marketplaces

Accelerated by the pandemic, consumer preferences have evolved along with the shift to digital marketplaces. They want the convenience and speed of online retail, but, due to the abundance of digital retailers, they are now facing a critical choice overload. With more CPG brands fighting over digital ad space and, subsequently, consumers’ attention online, the digital fatigue is real.

While online shopping is incredibly convenient, consumers will rarely convert to new products without trying them first. Think of your go-to brand of toothpaste, deodorant, tampon, etc. To convince you to switch from your tried-and-true household staple, CPG brands are bidding against each other for your attention via digital marketing campaigns with dismal conversion rates.

In today’s world, digital just isn’t enough. CPG brands need more effective ways to convert customers, and that’s exactly what we offer at Strapt Vending.

Strapt’s win-win-win solution for CPG brands

After a frustrating encounter with a crusty old tampon dispenser, I realized that the existing vending solution—unchanged since the 70s—was past due for an overhaul. I quickly learned that solving the unmet consumer need for basic access to [paid] period products required a more symbiotic partnership between consumers, consumer brands, and hosting facilities. Otherwise, there was little incentive to bring these dispensers into the 21st century.

So, I shifted the Strapt strategy to solve for facility and CPG brand pain points, too. In these brands’ increasingly crowded market, the problem is twofold: 1) reaching new consumers and 2) overriding their crippling overchoice dilemma.

Through contactless IoT dispensers, Strapt Vending offers a new and frictionless way for users to sample personal products and the first fully transparent opportunity for brands to reach customers at their exact point of need.

Sampling <> data-driven marketing technology

For Strapt’s brand partners, this means reaching their target market at a critical inflection point: exactly when and where they need the products via a channel that brands have never been able to utilize until now.

Through high-volume sampling campaigns, Strapt offers an invaluable asset to partner brands: full transparency into user interaction data, which has historically been unavailable via old-school sampling methods. In the words of one of our investors, Leura Craig of Outlander VC, “By taking a pretty old-school thing like vending and completely turning it on its head, Strapt is the first IRL sampling-based marketing tool of its kind. Not only is sampling an effective way to get in front of new consumers, but it’s likely a brands’ only chance at converting them away from a brand they depend on habitually. Strapt’s strategy is the future of this marketing technology, especially for CPG brands.”

The new Strapt ecosystem

Strapt has built the ecosystem for these dispensers to thrive in a way where everyone—the brands, facilities, and consumers—can win.

Since launching in August 2021, Strapt has partnered with three consumer brands, and our 150+ waitlist keeps growing! Via our 24 live dispensers, Strapt partners have reached 100,000+ consumers total and 4,000+ vended products—90% coming from unique users.

Backed by Outlander VC, Strapt is raising $2M to grow our team, expand our analytics platform, and scale production to support dispenser demand.

For expert advice on building and scaling your startup, check out our event library and Field Notes.

When it comes to choosing a co-founder, I’ve learned there’s no hard and fast path to success. In fact, I think most entrepreneurs would agree that finding and choosing an excellent co-founder is more of an art than a science. That being said, below are some tried and true ways to set yourself up for success.

Before we even begin discussing what to look for in a co-founder, we have to talk about how you find potential candidates in the first place. My best advice to entrepreneurs has always been to hang around the hoop. For those of you who aren’t basketball-fluent, the phrase means that to have any success, you’ve got to put yourself in the best position to score—around the hoop. Your hoop is anywhere good talent might be found: meetups, conferences, pitch competitions, Slack channels . . . you get the idea. Colleges are also great resources; you can reach out to computer science professors and leaders of student entrepreneurial and innovation clubs. If you have a good idea, can tell a story, and talk to enough people, the odds of finding folks who might be interested in joining your venture are in your favor.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but people frequently get it wrong. Many founders are drawn to people with professional backgrounds similar to their own because they already speak the same language or because they’re often in the same spaces. While it’s certainly important to gel with your co-founder, it’ll benefit you a lot more, down the line, to have someone whose strengths differ from your own.

The most common example of this is the classic nontechnical–technical co-founder pairing. The combination has many upsides because it lets the two individuals focus the bulk of their attention on different aspects of their start-up’s growth and success. But let’s say you already have a solid CTO and aren’t necessarily looking for a technical co-founder—what then? Find someone with complementary soft skills. If you’re not a stellar presenter, choose someone who can wow a room of investors. If you’ve mostly worked in silo-style roles across your career, seek out someone with team-leading experience. It’s more than OK to duplicate a similarity here and there (after all, you want to have some common ground to fall back on), but being aware of your own weaknesses and finding a way to address them with your choice of a co-founder is wise.

Let’s say you’ve got a few people in mind as potential co-founders but you’re not sure how to evaluate them for fit. A few years ago, I was in exactly that position. I felt like I was on a hamster wheel and desperately trying to get off. I realized that determining whether a candidate was a good fit was much harder than I had expected. At the time, I was subleasing office space from an EO Atlanta member. He’d been an entrepreneur for almost two decades. I regularly talked with him about things I was trying to figure out, and those informal conversations were invaluable. When I told him about my problem, he made an amazing offer: “How about I interview one of your candidates and you sit in? I can show you better than I can tell you.” I happily agreed. I was able to watch him in action, and I learned a ton—especially about how to figure out when someone isn’t the right fit.If you and your potential candidates are having conversations or doing things together to get to know one another, consider inviting someone to join you—perhaps an experienced entrepreneur. If you’ve raised capital from credible investors, consider getting their input, too. Whomever you ask to join you, make sure they have a track record of evaluating talent or some experience with entrepreneurial partnerships. Your goal is to have them compensate for your blind spots.

These three recommendations won’t drop the perfect co-founder into your lap, but they will help you whittle your options down to a few strong front-runners. At the end of the day, selecting the right person comes down to who you feel that difficult-to-describe “click” with when you’re sharing your vision. Choosing an excellent co-founder isn’t an impossible task, and it certainly is an important one when it comes to building a company that will succeed under your and your co-founder’s leadership.

For more expert advice on building and scaling your startup, check out our event library and Field Notes.

Founders’ most frequent pain points arise from pushing product development without speaking to their current customers.

Initially, convincing founders to pause product development to conduct customer interviews is a tough sell. To them, it often feels like rendering their current ‘baby’ useless. But I know that ~40% of startups fail because they lack product-market fit, which means building something people actually want is the bare minimum.

Ethnographic customer interviews

Personally, I love talking to users because I find people endlessly fascinating. But, as a founder, I found that formalizing our user interview process enabled us to quantify and track metrics of success and inform how we built Levantr.

Before building your product, start with ethnographic customer interviews. These are often just called customer interviews, but I like adding the adjective ‘ethnographic’ to it because that’s exactly what you are doing! You are trying to observe the users in their natural environment and see how they usually circumvent or deal with the problem you are trying to solve.

Through these interviews, you’re trying to get a glimpse into how people behave and why, so you can create and test more accurate hypotheses about what your users actually want.

Field Guide: Unlocking your users’ dream product with ethnographic customer interviews

Step 1: Define your target audience

There is a difference between people who would use your product and people desperate for it. You must find the latter for your MVP because they will become your cult following.

At my startup Levantr—a collaborative travel planner—our customer segment was obviously people who like traveling, which is… a majority of the global population. So, we narrowed it down to people who enjoy planning, i.e., the people who create color-coded, multi-tabbed spreadsheets and send you SurveyMonkey forms to rally the crew. Of course, we all know at least one person like that.

These Type-A travelers not only travel frequently but think about traveling all the time. What does that mean? They follow travel blogs and are active in FB groups. They were our cult.

Step 2: Find and screen interviewees

First, look for interviewees on platforms like respondent.io, UserInterviews.com, and Askable. If your targets aren’t showing up on research platforms, try creating job postings asking your target profile to participate in a paid study or using social media platforms like LinkedIn to find target profiles to reach out to directly.

When offering money in exchange for interviews, you’ll inevitably attract some bad apples willing to lie to qualify for the study for the fee. However, you can weed them out using carefully crafted screener questions.

For example, here are some of the questions I used to screen Levantr interviewees:

Notice that #4 asks if they will show us their previous itinerary—this weeds out people who pretend to be active planners to qualify. I also ask how they usually get ideas to make sure we find people who think about travel frequently even if they are not traveling.

The last question is intentionally left open-ended to test how much detail they included. You want to find chatty interviewees who will quickly give you the most detailed insights.

Step 3: Conduct productive interviews

Conducting interviews remotely is more accessible, cheaper, and allows you to record your sessions. Recording not only helps you stay focused on the conversation without having to take notes, but investors love to see footage from your user interviews. Plus, you are not limited geographically, which removes any local bias.

The #1 rule of user interviews is to never ask them what solution they want directly. Instead, focus on understanding their problems, how they approach them today, and, most importantly, why. Your job is to observe and ask users to elaborate when they say something interesting.

#3 is critical. It helps them travel back into a context relevant to your conversation and visualize the problem. Again, you’re triggering the emotions they felt during their last encounter, resulting in more accurate insights. This way, they’ll explain their process and show you how they perform the task.

Step 4: Apply feedback to MVP + MVB

Now that you collected your user feedback, you must decipher the implications and translate them into a product vision.

For example, here’s a list of steps I take to interpret interview insights while minimizing my own biases:

One of the recurring themes during Levantr’s pre-product ethnographic interviews was the importance of visuals in travel planning.

So, when we built the Levantr marketplace, we made sure that all the tiles/cards for our idea boards and itineraries included pictures. Plus, we knew that prioritizing the visual appeal of Levantr’s branding/marketing was critical to creating a sticky platform our customers love to use.

Context is key

To close, I’ll leave you all with my favorite example of ethnographic interviews gone wrong: “The Pepsi Challenge.”

Pepsi had a campaign where people taste-tested Pepsi and Coke while blindfolded, then indicated their preference. And surprise, surprise, Pepsi was the winner. Meanwhile, Coke was extremely worried because their internal studies showed similar results. So, in response, they created ‘New Coke’ to mimic Pepsi’s sweeter taste and introduced it to the market with great confidence.

‘New Coke’ failed spectacularly, and Coke’s customers were pissed. But why?

The sip tests didn’t take into consideration the environment in which people drink Coke. People don’t take just one sip when drinking soda; they drink a whole can of Coke with a meal, at a sporting event, at the movies, etc. In the actual use-case contexts, people prefer the crisper taste of Coke over the saccharine sweetness of Pepsi or ‘New Coke’—except in small, sippable doses. The theory is that a home-use test would’ve yielded a very different outcome.

Coke recovered from the ‘New Coke’ fiasco because they’re a well-established brand with loyal customers and money allocated for trial-and-error product development. But startups don’t have the same luxury. That’s why investing a few hundred bucks now to talk to your target audience through a contextual inquiry.

So, what can founders learn from Coke? First and foremost, the quality of your user research will determine your ability to build the product of your target audiences’ dreams. How you ask your research questions matters: carefully consider your word choice and the context of both your interviewees and the problem you’re trying to solve. Finally, listen to your customers before rolling out a ‘New Coke’ product development that nobody wants.

For more expert advice on building and scaling your startup, check out our event library and Field Notes.

As an investor, I’ve seen a lot of startup pitches—the good, the bad, and the ugly. And as a former founder, I feel for them. I know how daunting it can be to take the vision in your head, condense it into a clear explanation, and get others to quickly believe in it too. Early on, I also struggled to succinctly communicate the vision I had for my company.

At Outlander VC, I combine my experiences as a founder and investor to help our portfolio companies perfect their pitches. These are some of the best tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way to prepare, perfect, and present your pitch so that investors want to hear it.

#1: PREPARE to showcase the founding team’s intelligence, vision, character, and ability to execute

When you’re raising capital in the early stages, there isn’t much of a company to pitch yet. It’s just a few folks, an idea, and maybe an MVP. You probably don’t have customers, users, or meaningful quantitative data to inform the investment decision.

Early-stage investing decisions come down to evaluating how the founders answer the following questions, based on Outlander’s Founder Framework model:

Ultimately, early-stage investors are looking for a founding team worth betting on. Early-stage founders with compelling answers to the above questions demonstrate they have the intelligence, vision, character, and ability to execute necessary to build on their thesis and scale it into an industry-disrupting powerhouse.

#2: PERFECT by hitting “record” first; then practice, practice, practice

Helping early-stage founders perfect their pitches, I’ve noticed a common disconnect: passionate founders who eat, sleep, and breathe their startup perceive the cadence of their pitch as clear, confident, and compelling—but investors often hear it differently.

For example, I was recently working with a founder on his pitch. He has the big vision and passion necessary to convince investors, but his delivery needed fine-tuning. Seeing is believing, so I suggested he record his next pitch and send me the recording.

The next time we spoke, he told me that he’d realized, watching the recording, that he’d had no idea how his pitch sounded. With the recording, he could self-critique and correct every part of his delivery he didn’t like. He could sit on the other side of the pitch deck and, for the first time, see exactly what his potential investors would see.

We decided to take this exercise a step further. Instead of booking time with peers to get their feedback, he sent them links to his recorded pitch. Recording his pitch practice worked well for several reasons:

Recording yourself isn’t novel—it’s a time-tested tool, and it’s still highly effective. Plus, with new WFH tools like Loom’s simultaneous camera, microphone, and desktop recording technology, sharing a virtual pitch has never been easier. If you want to perfect your pitch, consider tapping “record” first!

#3: PITCH starting with these three questions

As I said, I’ve watched a lot of pitches. The most painful to watch are those where the investor struggles to understand what the founder is trying to communicate. But I’ve helped founders whose pitch crashed and burned in the morning regroup, adjust their approach, and nail the same pitch a few hours later.

The difference? At the beginning of the second meeting, the founders sought to understand their audience by asking a few simple questions, which allowed them to deliver the pitch in the way the audience preferred. The change was small but powerful.

Understanding the audience goes a long way toward helping founders communicate effectively and gain support. The questions above will help accomplish that, but it’s by no means an exhaustive list. Plenty of other questions would also work. Regardless of what you ask, I’d limit it to two or three questions.

Test your perfected pitch at OutPitch 2.0

Now that you’ve perfected your pitch, we want to see it! Here’s what you need to know:

Outlander VC is inviting the most innovative early-stage tech startups in the United States to out-vision, outsmart, and outpitch the competition at OutPitch 2.0! Apply now to compete for $100,000 investment from Outlander VC during the live event on December 7, 2021.

For more expert advice on building and scaling your startup, check out our event library and Field Notes.

On April 23, 2005, ‘Me at the Zoo’ was the first video ever uploaded to a then little-known site called Youtube. This moment was an inflection point that precipitated the explosions of video-first social media services over the next 15 years: TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Moreover, it was a harbinger of much broader changes to come.

COVID-19 altered the world in many ways; being locked in our homes forced us to rethink how we communicate, work, and socialize. It has also led to a tectonic shift in how businesses operate. COVID has been the accelerant that has led to the decentralization of the global workforce.

Enterprises have been forced to change centuries-old practices of having people come into an office to work. And video is the medium that enabled them to do so.

This is not a discrete or temporary event. As the pandemic recedes and the world begins to regain an air of normalcy, many businesses have been compelled by their employees to rethink the very concept of ‘the office.’ The ideas put forth by managers for generations—such as productivity tied to the physical place of work—have now been debunked as relics of the industrial age. This shift did not transpire out of some charitable concern for employee welfare but, instead, driven by sheer economics and by employees refusing to work in conditions that negatively affect their lives without clear benefits to the productivity of their employers.

With video now acting as the conduit for productivity, what’s next? We believe the answer lies with automation. The trend for automating work is not new, but video provides ample opportunities for doing it in novel ways.

Robotic process automation is the early precursor of this ethos. With the automation of basic digital workflows and no-code environments, the automated back-office tasks increase productivity and free employees of time-consuming, remedial tasks. Companies such as UI-Path, Automation Anywhere, and others have trailblazed no-code automation tools that enable workers to automate their daily tasks. Much like the wheel or the steam engine, these tools shift the burden of work off of people onto machines. However, while videos have become ever more present in work, leveraging the information trapped within them has not been possible until recently.

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides the key to unlock this potential in video.

The rapid development of machine vision and similar technologies propelled by the expansion of deep learning systems has primed the world for automations that use video as a proxy for many tasks that otherwise would be impossible to capture.

From sales information in Zoom presentations to quality control on semiconductor manufacturing lines, video data is ripe with hooks that can be used as proxies for automation.

If we can tap into the unstructured information stored in these videos and automate processes around it, we could automate even more of our workload and free employees of even more time-consuming, repetitive tasks.

Utilizing video data has never been more relevant. COVID-19 not only reframed the way we work but also the way we consume information on a day-to-day basis. Being quarantined in our homes forced us to consume our news, connect with the world, and seek entertainment not through the lens of personal interaction but primarily through videos broadcasted live and published on social media.

This drastic change in information consumption has led to a media landscape ripe for “disinformation” to propagate and pass into our society completely unchecked. Through a combination of state-sponsored misinformation and individual bad actors, it’s become incredibly difficult to understand what is true and what is not, and video is the most compelling piece of many disinformation arcs. It’s becoming increasingly easy for a maligned actor to edit a piece of video, remove valuable context, or share a video post from an entirely separate location with a leading caption and have their post go viral.

To address this type of disinformation, the ability to attribute provenance at scale is crucial. Consequently, the ability to collect live, social, and archival content is necessary for anyone attempting to validate whether or not a piece of content is original, manipulated, or has appeared across other channels. Finally, there is a need for automated tools to analyze and uncover strategies, patterns, and methods used by these actors in their narratives.

Large platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have already begun developing in-house tools for tackling things like DeepFakes. Smaller organizations, however, are lagging behind in this effort, as they lack the expertise required to develop such systems.

At Vidrovr, we work with organizations to bridge this gap and utilize their video data to uncover patterns and automate business processes.

For example, we developed a solution for the Association for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard to analyze large amounts of media content—both text and video—to comprehensively look at the information landscape created by state-sponsored media outlets. These types of technologies are the first step in a long journey towards a robust understanding of the current media landscape.

These are the problems that we at Vidrovr are focused on solving. We build AI tools for unlocking insights trapped in unstructured multimedia and video to drive data visibility, understand the video information landscape, and enable business automations. Learn more about our solutions at https://vidrovr.com.

We’re always looking for partners to help on this journey, so please reach out to our team at contact@vidrovr.com. Plus, we’re hiring for our marketing, sales, and engineering teams! If you think you might be a good fit or want to learn more about our vision for the future, we’d love to hear from you.

Forming a new startup is an exciting time filled with optimism and potential. Finding the right people for your team, landing some early investors, and building out your product are all thrilling milestones. But just as important (if not quite as thrilling) are some key legal fundamentals that you’ll have to nail early on.

Every startup needs to get these tasks right at the beginning; failure to do so will lead to difficult, protracted, and costly problems. I should know, my first job after being a partner at a big law firm was cleaning stuff up at Oculus, so it could do its Series A.

Despite legal forms you can find on the internet or from DIY websites such as Clerky promising to make forming a startup easy, more often than not, these seven items are not done right:

How do you accomplish the 7 things every startup needs to get right?

We have found that systems, processes, knowledge and counseling, good decision-making – and then recording decisions in such a way as to be able to automatically translate those decisions into legal paperwork – can solve 90% of these problems (and avoid $100,000 cleanups later).

As you see, it’s a lot of work to take on those seven things, especially if you’re a first-time founder – but they’re absolutely critical to your future success. For that reason, we put together StartupProgram.com, or SUP, so that our clients can efficiently and cost-effectively get these nuts-and-bolts items checked off their to do lists. We’d love to help your startup, too.

Join us on 6/9 at 12 pm ET for the first of our quarterly Legal Lab learning series and our monthly, 1:1 Legal Lab Office Hours with Dan Offner! 🧪

The Rise of Women-Led VC Firms in 2024

24 Top Women-Led VC Firms in 2024 and How to Apply for Funding

Outlander VC

BBG Ventures

Acrew Capital

Cowboy Ventures

Female Founders Fund

The Artemis Fund

Aspect Ventures

Construct Capital

Forerunner Ventures

Renegade Partners

Union Square Ventures

Redpoint Ventures

Revolution Ventures

Bond Capital

Pear VC

Alpaca VC

Baukunst

Greycroft

NextView Ventures

Cake Ventures

Halogen Ventures

Rivet Ventures

Spero Ventures

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Recruitment Dos + Don’ts

✅ Define what great means.

✅ Create benchmarks and systems for evaluating employees.

🛑 Try cloning a top performer.

🛑 Force yourself into liking a candidate.

Retention Dos + Don’ts

✅ Prioritize onboarding.

✅ Set clear expectations.

🛑 Prioritize results > culture.

🛑 Jump straight to firing employees.

Organize for culture

Challenges of a Virtual Storefront

Optimizing a Virtual Storefront

Outlandish Sales 101 x Eric Sikola

Brand loyalty vs. digital marketplaces

Strapt’s win-win-win solution for CPG brands

Sampling <> data-driven marketing technology

The new Strapt ecosystem

Ethnographic customer interviews

Field Guide: Unlocking your users’ dream product with ethnographic customer interviews

Step 1: Define your target audience

Step 2: Find and screen interviewees

Step 3: Conduct productive interviews

Step 4: Apply feedback to MVP + MVB

Context is key

#1: PREPARE to showcase the founding team’s intelligence, vision, character, and ability to execute

#2: PERFECT by hitting “record” first; then practice, practice, practice

#3: PITCH starting with these three questions

Test your perfected pitch at OutPitch 2.0

Enterprises have been forced to change centuries-old practices of having people come into an office to work. And video is the medium that enabled them to do so.

With video now acting as the conduit for productivity, what’s next? We believe the answer lies with automation. The trend for automating work is not new, but video provides ample opportunities for doing it in novel ways.

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides the key to unlock this potential in video.

If we can tap into the unstructured information stored in these videos and automate processes around it, we could automate even more of our workload and free employees of even more time-consuming, repetitive tasks.

At Vidrovr, we work with organizations to bridge this gap and utilize their video data to uncover patterns and automate business processes.

How do you accomplish the 7 things every startup needs to get right?