What we look for at seed

Underwriting a seed company is an exercise in reading potential. The financials are thin, the product is early, and the market may not yet exist in the form the founders imagine. What remains is a set of signals that, in our experience, separate the companies that compound from the ones that stall. We organize those signals into three lenses, and we score each opportunity against all three.

Market

We look for markets that are large or credibly becoming large, with timing on the company’s side and a path to reach customers efficiently. A great team in a small or mistimed market is a hard investment to make work. The question is not only how big the market is today, but whether the wind is at the company’s back.

Execution

Product, early traction, and a coherent business model tell us whether a team can turn insight into a company. At seed the signal is rarely revenue; it is evidence of learning velocity, the rate at which a team ships, listens, and improves. We would rather back a team moving quickly through informed iterations than one defending a static plan.

Team, and the trait we weight most

Founders are the largest single determinant of a seed outcome, so the team lens carries the most weight. We look for genuine insight into the problem, the drive to see it through, and, above all, coachability. Coachability is not compliance; it is the ability to take in new information and update. It is the founder-side mirror of our own thesis, that better information should change decisions.

Reading the three together

No single lens decides. A company that scores well on market and execution but poorly on team is a different risk from one strong on team and market but early on execution. The triple-lens score is a structured way to make those trade-offs explicit, comparable across opportunities, and legible to the investment committee. It is not a formula that makes the decision for us; it is a discipline that makes the decision honest.