Ten One Ten Ventures Research
Investment Thesis
TenOneTen Ventures is a Los Angeles-based seed-stage venture firm built on the principle of "technical founders backing technical founders." The partnership targets essential, often overlooked industries — healthcare, logistics, real estate, and manufacturing — that face both existential threats and enormous opportunity from technical innovation. Rather than chasing the most hyped consumer or fintech categories, TenOneTen looks for hard technical problems inside legacy sectors of the economy where deep domain expertise and engineering rigor create durable advantages. Many of the firm's partners are themselves former founders and operators, which shapes a thesis grounded in empathy for early-stage technical teams navigating unglamorous but massive markets.
Sector Focus
The firm's stated focus areas are healthcare, logistics/supply chain, real estate and construction, and manufacturing/industrial. In practice its portfolio also spans a large cluster of data-and-AI infrastructure companies that sell into these verticals (fraud detection, workflow automation, computer vision, and applied ML tooling), plus a smaller set of media/gaming and retail/service-industry bets. The through-line across sectors is technical founders solving operationally hard problems rather than pure software plays.
Stage Focus
TenOneTen invests primarily at Pre-Seed and Seed, with occasional participation at Series A as a follow-on. The firm makes roughly 10 new investments per year, a deliberately low-volume, high-conviction cadence that allows partners to work closely with founders in the earliest, highest-risk phase of company building.
Check Size
Typical initial checks run $500K to $5M, with the firm leading or co-leading approximately 75% of the rounds it participates in — an unusually high lead rate for a fund of its size, and a signal that TenOneTen positions itself as an anchor investor rather than a filler check.
Lead Tendency
TenOneTen leads the large majority of its investments (~75%), consistent with its self-description as a hands-on, conviction-driven seed lead rather than a passive follower.
Recent Activity
The firm has stayed active through 2025 and into 2026: a $5M seed round for Linker Finance (community banking infrastructure, July 2026), a pre-seed investment in DeepWeave (March 2026), a $65M growth round for healthcare AI company Artera (December 2025), the stealth emergence of retail-ops startup Meadow AI with $6M (November 2025), a $3.5M raise for restaurant voice-AI startup Loman AI (August 2025), a $40M investment from Koch's venture arm into logistics-tech portfolio company Optimal Dynamics (May 2025), a $3.3M round for proptech startup Domos (April 2025), and portfolio company BuildOps crossing unicorn status with a $127M raise (March 2025). Aerospace portfolio company Urban Sky has been particularly active, closing a $30M round in February 2025 and winning a STRATFI government contract in August 2025.
Portfolio Highlights
TenOneTen's 165+ investment portfolio includes several notable exits: Kaggle (acquired by Google), Divshot (acquired by Google), MindMeld (acquired by Cisco), Mapsense (acquired by Apple), Goodreads (acquired by Amazon), Curbside (acquired by Rakuten), Bridg (acquired by Cardlytics), Locu (acquired by GoDaddy), Movoto (acquired by Recruit), DataScience.com (acquired by Oracle), Misfit Wearables (acquired by Fossil), NavTrac (acquired by Loadsmart), Fantasmo (acquired by Tier Mobility), Genda (acquired by Buildots), Memorable (acquired by Reddit, 2024), and 3Laws Robotics (acquired by Amazon, 2024). Active standouts include unicorn BuildOps (commercial services software), Crexi (commercial real estate marketplace), Regard (AI-powered clinical diagnosis, which raised $61M in 2024), Flock Freight (freight logistics), Mashgin (computer-vision checkout), Alation (data catalog/governance), Artera (patient communication platform), TrueAccord (fintech collections), and Urban Sky (stratospheric imaging balloons).
Team
- David Waxman — Partner, and a frequent public voice for the firm (author of firm essays such as "Money at Machine Speed")
- Gil Elbaz — Partner; co-founder of Applied Semantics (acquired by Google, becoming the basis for AdSense) and Factual
- Minnie Ingersoll — Partner; former COO of Shift Technologies and early Google product lead
- Eric Pakravan — Partner; writes public investment rationale posts (e.g., on Tristar AI)
- Conor Webb — Partner, Operations
- Nicole Toussaint — Investor
- Rohan Gupta — Investor
- Eytan Elbaz — Venture Partner; co-founder of Applied Semantics
- Jim Moffatt — Venture Partner; former global CEO of Deloitte Consulting
- Todd Gitlin — Talent Partner
- Leah Woodring — Operations
Decision Process
As a small partnership (four investing partners plus venture/talent partners), TenOneTen operates as a partnership-level decision process rather than a large investment committee, consistent with its high lead-investor rate and hands-on seed focus.
Founder Preferences
The firm's tagline of "technical founders backing technical founders" signals a strong preference for founders with deep technical or domain expertise tackling structurally hard problems in essential industries, rather than founders pursuing purely growth-marketing-driven consumer plays.
Geographic Focus
TenOneTen describes its investment scope as global but calls Los Angeles "our backyard," reflecting a home-market density in Southern California alongside a broader US and international portfolio.