Horizon Research
Investment Thesis
Horizon is an early-stage software fund founded in 2022 by General Partners Sandy Kory and Mike Firmage. The firm's stated thesis is explicitly "anti-playbook": rather than screening for a narrow founder profile or a fixed set of sub-sectors, Horizon backs "independent thinkers with bold, pioneering ideas" and "technical, product-obsessed leaders with extraordinary ambition" pursuing genuine disruption. The firm repeatedly emphasizes that it prioritizes potential over credentials, stating founders "can't be too green," and positions itself as a generalist software investor with a bias toward AI-native and B2B products.
Stage Focus
Horizon invests almost exclusively at pre-seed and seed. Roughly two-thirds of its public portfolio is pre-seed or seed; a small number of positions (e.g. Bland) have since progressed to Series A through investor follow-on rights rather than net-new later-stage entries.
Check Size
Horizon writes initial checks of $250K to $1.5M, and the firm states it "frequently follows on" in later rounds of its strongest portfolio companies.
Lead Tendency
Across the confirmed rounds reviewed (Pier's $2.4M seed, BuildPass's $7.5M seed led by Carthona Capital, Julius AI's $10M seed led by Bessemer, and Lace's $14M seed led by Bek Ventures), Horizon consistently appears as a participating co-investor alongside a separate lead, rather than as the lead itself. The firm should be treated as a syndicate participant more often than a lead.
Recent Activity
Horizon has been actively deploying through 2024 and 2025: BuildPass (construction site management, Oct 2024), Pier (credit-as-a-service, Jan 2024), Lace (call-center revenue intelligence, Apr 2025), and Julius AI (AI data analyst, Jul 2025) are the most recently documented rounds with public sourcing. Fund I is sized at $44M.
Portfolio Highlights
Horizon's headline claim to fame is early exposure to two outsized outcomes: Palantir (invested 2009, well before Horizon's 2022 founding — this reflects Sandy Kory's personal angel history that the firm's marketing credits to the platform) and Canva (invested at seed). The current fund's 21-company public portfolio spans AI infrastructure (Baseten, Marble), AI-native vertical software (Artos, Lyrebird Health, Sample, Praxos, Julius AI), fintech (Pier, Float, Sandbox, Subscript), developer tooling (Nango, Shuttle), hardware (Raven AR glasses, SendCutSend on-demand manufacturing, Vexev medical imaging), and enterprise/voice AI (Bland, Lace, Pylon, Arkham).
Team
- Sandy Kory, General Partner — Founded Horizon in 2022 after 15+ years in venture, with an early personal-investing track record that includes Palantir, Canva, BillionToOne, Flutterwave, and Sendbird.
- Mike Firmage, General Partner — Runs legal and finance for the fund; separately founded and operates Horizon Partners, a technology-focused M&A advisory boutique (a distinct entity from Horizon the fund, despite the name overlap).
- Shivali Halabe, Associate — Handles sourcing and post-investment founder support; former quantitative trader at SIG, Cornell computer science.
Decision Process
A small partnership of two GPs plus one associate; no evidence of a formal investment committee structure was found on the public site.
Founder Preferences
Horizon's public materials consistently emphasize technical, product-led founders who are early in their credential-building (the firm explicitly rejects the idea that a founder can be "too green") over founders with conventional pedigrees.
Geographic Focus
The portfolio is majority US (concentrated in San Francisco), with a meaningful cluster of Australian companies (BuildPass, Lyrebird Health, Vexev — all Melbourne/Sydney) plus one-off positions in Lagos (Float), London (Shuttle), and distributed teams (Nango, Sandbox, Subscript).
Data Quality Note
This firm was flagged for research because it (or a same-named firm) appears at #71 on the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson Emerging VC ranking. The ranking source lists that entry as "Horizon Venture," based in Miami — a location and name that do not match this firm's San Francisco-based "Horizon" / HorizonVC (Sandy Kory, Mike Firmage). This may be a name collision with a different, unrelated "Horizon Venture" fund rather than confirmation that horizon.vc placed on the list. Flagging for human review rather than asserting the ranking as an activity event for this firm.