Best Pre-Seed E-commerce & Marketplaces + Developer Tools & Infrastructure Investors 2026

The future of commerce will be shaped by technology companies that transform retail and e-commerce infrastructure. We partner with technical founders who deeply understand commerce pain points and can scale solutions across global retail and e-commerce businesses.

Partner with ambitious founders building category-winning companies. We believe great founders who understand execution, customer obsession, and operational excellence can build transformative companies. We provide capital, operational guidance, network access, and strategic partnership—not just funding.

Investing at the intersection of Invention & Culture. We back founders building category-defining consumer companies where technology breakthroughs meet emerging human behavior. We see inflection points before they're consensus by tracking both emerging technology capabilities and emerging consumer demands.

Visionary founders building disruptive software businesses deserve capital and operational support from partners who understand building category-defining companies. We provide both.

Back disruptive entrepreneurs at the intersection of LatAm-specific problems and technical solutions. Leverage deep operational expertise from unicorn exits (Rappi, Kavak, iFood) to provide hands-on partnership from day one. Focus on cross-border commerce, fintech, SaaS, and marketplaces serving emerging markets.

Invest in founders building radically different technology companies with unique business models or distribution strategies. Focus on high-velocity founders who are maniacs on a mission.

Great ideas can come from anywhere. We support outsider founders with capital, operational expertise, connections, and authentic partnership. We stand in your corner, not your kitchen.

Backing transformative founders building exceptional companies across all sectors

Partner with ambitious founders building category-winning companies. We believe great founders who understand execution, customer obsession, and operational excellence can build transformative companies. We provide capital, operational guidance, network access, and strategic partnership—not just funding.

Back exceptional outlier founders with conviction and unwavering support. Kevin Hartz identified that over 20% of Fund II is invested in teenage founders—not as social experiment but as genuine thesis that exceptional outliers often emerge young. The firm provides operator-heavy partnership with deep expertise in founder psychology, financial operations, and growth scaling. They position themselves as guiding outliers from idea to IPO.

Backing builders of the future of interactive entertainment. We invest across games, content, platforms, and ecosystem technologies with conviction that visionary founders are driving transformation in how we play, watch, create, and live.

Invest earlier than most other investors and make decisions quickly. We focus on ambitious founders building unusually great companies in SaaS, developer tools, fintech, open source, and marketplaces. Our smaller check sizes allow founders to maintain control and enable us to deploy efficiently across 100+ companies.

We back bold founders reshaping how we live, work, move, and connect. Our perspective is global. Our standard is excellence. Our purpose is to expand access, ownership, and opportunity at scale. We view the underfunding of women and founders of color as a market inefficiency.

Early-stage consumer startups leveraging technology to be cheaper and better, expanding market access. Back bold founders willing to take substantial personal risks and reshape categories. Focus on 99% economy democratizing access.

Partner with exceptional founders at the very inception of their entrepreneurial journey. Our proprietary data-driven technology identifies promising founders beyond immediate networks. We focus on teams with strong product sense and bottoms-up growth potential in data-driven software categories.

Before there is a company, there is a conversation - we want to be that first conversation. We invest in founder market fit and the beginning of movements, backing founders with vision to create category-defining businesses. We believe in being your friend in the room with honesty and tough love.

Investing in the future of commerce, AI, and labor. We believe our biggest asset is knocking down doors for our founders — leveraging our network of 50+ Fortune 500 CEOs and tech executives as LPs to open customer relationships, accelerate go-to-market, and support talent acquisition.

The best founders want to be backed by other founders. Smaller funds run by founders perform best at pre-seed/seed stage. We operate as a decentralized fund-of-micro-funds empowering founder-GPs across global regions.

We invest in non-obvious founders with deep founder-market fit. Like a professional cycling leadout team, we protect and position founders while leveraging a curated network of operators from Apple, Stripe, and Nvidia to provide unusually broad support from day one. Over 85% of our portfolio is led by women or underrepresented minorities.

We invest in founders leading their first institutional venture round. Our mission is to catalyze transformation in Latin America by partnering with the region's top entrepreneurs. Together, we create cycles of innovation, empowerment and change. We believe in long-term partnerships and hands-on support.

Asymmetric invests in exceptional founders disrupting legacy industries through Vertical Software, Healthcare IT & Services, and SMB Consolidations (rollups). The firm targets 20% ownership as lead, writing $2-10M checks from Pre-seed through Series A. Founded by former PE investors and operators who provide deep operational, strategic, and financial partnership beyond capital.

Back exceptional founders early in their journey with capital combined with strategic operational guidance, business development support, and access to a network of successful entrepreneurs and operators. Get most excited at the first stages of company building.

Community-driven VC led by active operators who simultaneously build and invest. Best support for founders comes from operators understanding current market challenges firsthand, not just history. Invest in category-defining technology companies.

Crypto can enable billions of internet users to become owners—of their money, identity, and the products and networks they use every day. We invest in decentralized protocols, infrastructure, and applications that advance true user ownership.

Founders with genuine conviction solving important problems, backed by unfair advantages and exceptional drive. We provide capital, operational expertise, and access to 100+ world-class startup operators. Our value is in the people on your cap table and the hands-on support—not just the checks.

We invest in entrepreneurs who personally understand the problems they plan to solve. Meaningful businesses require big vision backed by strong skills, deep insights, and rooted passion. We believe connections to experienced operators and industry experts dramatically accelerate company growth. We target companies pursuing industries hungry for innovation where technology creates defensible network effects.

We are long-term business partners to founders. We operate as an investment partnership focused on founders building category-defining African technology companies, with tight founder-investor-LP alignment and deep operational support.

We partner with high-integrity, problem-obsessed, wildly interesting founders at early stage. We are long-term investors, backing founders at inception and continuing to invest until IPO. We have a single mandate: to help fledgling companies navigate the challenges of building generational businesses. Rather than being a traditional write-a-check fund, we provide full-stack partnership: capital, operational support, strategic introductions, recruiting, business development, and fundraising support.

We back exceptional founders tackling the world's toughest problems focused on affordability, economic mobility, and sustainability. We view ourselves as builders first and investors second, showing up early, staying late, and working alongside founding teams.

We invest in category-defining companies at Pre-Seed and Seed stages founded by entrepreneurs with authentic passion. Focus on founders working in climate, food, healthcare, AI automation, and frontier technologies. Philosophy: when the world says No, go toward the Yes as hard as you can.

Back underestimated founders with something to prove who are disrupting large markets. Emphasizes geographic arbitrage in emerging markets (Africa, LATAM, Asia) where founder quality is exceptional but capital access is limited.

We invest in early-stage companies with great ideas and exceptional people behind them. The best teams have passion, perseverance, and proven execution capability. We look for genuine market problems, cost-effective solutions, clear paths to monetization, and teams that will execute relentlessly.

Identify and partner with visionary entrepreneurs building category-creating companies that unlock entirely new addressable markets. Focus on 'silent suffering' where customers tolerate suboptimal solutions. Use AI, data, and behavioral science to identify non-obvious market opportunities and founder-market fit.

Global early-stage investor backing technical founders building category-defining ventures with global ambition. We believe exceptional founders can emerge from anywhere, and we provide operational support through a network of 16 global offices to help them scale across multiple continents from day zero.

Patient, long-term capital partners to the most ambitious founders. Help founders navigate from v1 (seed) to s-1 (Series A+). We believe the best companies are built by ambitious founders who need patient capital, operational expertise, and partnership from experienced operators.

Back exceptional entrepreneurs with high-conviction checks, provide rapid decision-making turnaround, and offer operational partnership. One-person decision-making enables speed and founder alignment.

Shine partners with creative, convincing, relentless entrepreneurs to build iconic businesses. They are lateralists - using non-linear logic to identify innovation at the intersections of technology, markets, and culture. The firm invests thematically in areas shaped by four trends: Great Expectations (demand for quality), Merging Digital/Physical (computing power), Reimagining Security (infrastructure/identity), and Reestablishing Meaning (community/belonging).

High-touch early-stage investing in technology founders building durable software and tech-enabled category leaders, with particular strength in SaaS and the Utah/Silicon Slopes ecosystem.

Back notable founders with global ambitions using technology to transform industries. We partner with exceptional teams to scale from seed through IPO, providing capital, operational expertise, and network access.

Back electric founders with an uncontrollable passion for creating disruptive companies. Invest globally, particularly strong in US and Latin America. Combine capital with operational support through venture studio model, helping build groundbreaking companies from inception through scale.

We support ambitious founders solving large problems through technology across all stages. Independent thinkers who challenge conventional wisdom are our ideal partners. We provide not just capital but operational expertise, global networks, and hands-on support from day one through scale.

We invest in industry-shifting startups led by best-in-class multicultural founders. We partner with the next generation of Asian Pacific operators turned founders and welcome investors advancing culture and heritage through an affinity-based, returns-driven model.

Africa's future prosperity depends on technological innovation across foundational sectors. Brilliant entrepreneurs applying technology to solve Africa's most pressing problems build world-class businesses while generating exceptional returns. Commercial rigor combined with social impact creates sustainable value.

We back European platforms of tomorrow that democratize market access and enhance efficiency through the power of network effects. Platforms create value by connecting multiple stakeholders in sustainable, long-term businesses.

Investing in customer-obsessed founders redefining everyday experiences. We back founders at the earliest stage (pre-product/pre-revenue) with conviction, capital, and deep operational support including marketing, customer acquisition, and technology infrastructure.

Backs extraordinary pre-seed and seed technology founders, with hands-on technical, operational, finance, and leadership support delivered with a collaborative co-founder attitude.

Empowering visionary entrepreneurs to build unique solutions that reshape how Indians live, work, consume, and transact. Kalaari backs potential over pedigree — first-time founders welcome — focusing on tech-driven Indian market opportunities from Pre-Seed through Series A.

Partner with passionate entrepreneurs building companies that change the way we live, work, play, or learn. We're operator-first investors who provide capital, strategic guidance, and operational mentorship alongside network and investor connections.

Early-stage, operator-led firm investing in next-generation consumer platforms, products, and services. We combine fintech, entertainment, and Wall Street expertise to provide hands-on operational support beyond capital.

Back technology that enhances human potential, not just fancy tech. Invest in passionate founders solving real market problems with human-centered impact. Focus on sustainable businesses contributing to economic transformation in Latin America and globally.

Kindred backs visionary and relentless founders building the future using technology and science at the earliest stages, often helping form companies before they exist. With Kindred Ventures IV and Kindred Selector II, the firm is emphasizing the novel intelligence frontier: AGI-capable models and harnesses that extend human capabilities, new AI-native consumer and enterprise experiences, physical AI, compute, infrastructure, energy, science, outer space, and inner space.

Building, not betting, with rebels transforming massive traditional industries through applied AI. Hands-on operational partnership combining capital with customer acquisition, team building, and strategic guidance.

Venture capital is the most powerful economic engine the world has ever seen. We back audacious founders solving humanity's hardest challenges through category-creating innovations. We embrace big risks and reject short-termism, committing to 15+ year partnerships with founders who have long-term vision and relentless determination.

Partner with entrepreneurs breaking trail in their industry, putting customers first and solving meaningful problems. Focus on founder-led, mission-driven companies combining customer-centric products with operational excellence. Strong emphasis on consumer products, lifestyle brands, and tech-enabled enterprises.

Emerging tech and AI are changing the commerce landscape. We power the future of commerce by investing in cutting-edge enablement technologies that support retailers, brands, creators, and manufacturers serving Black and Latinx founders and consumers. We pair platform investments with CPG investments with explicit racial equity mandate.

Back founders building things the world hasn't seen yet, at the moment before the crowd believes. Combine capital with extraordinary operational support through largest Portfolio Impact team at any NYC seed investor. Focus on technical founders solving real problems with clear product-market fit signals.

Back founder-operators with deep industry experience and prior successful exits. Invest from position of operational insight rather than pure financial engineering. Focus on companies showing early traction and founder-market fit across consumer, fintech, enterprise software, and automation.

Turning access into opportunity for founders, investors, and disruptive ideas by backing culturally resonant tech companies and founders who don't fit traditional Silicon Valley mold. Emphasis on showing up right way for founders, making bold bets, and committing fully from first check.

We back outliers of the outliers - founders with unreasonable ambition who can filter out 95% of conventional VC advice. We seek category-defining companies aiming for $10B+ outcomes, not incremental improvements. Our conviction is deep, selective, and global. We don't meddle - we provide brutal honesty, talent upgrades, and capital for survival through near-death moments.

Empower audacious founders who challenge norms and leverage technology to transform industries. We believe in first-time founders with scrappy outsider mentality and narrow niche focus. Silicon Valley expertise combined with deep emerging market knowledge across three continents.

Invest in the smartest people, regardless of what they're building, especially if the idea sounds bad in the beginning. Focus on exceptional founders in overlooked markets and non-consensus businesses. Optimize for founder quality over sector fit.

Bold, visionary African founders solving Africa's biggest challenges represent global business opportunities. We combine capital, operational support, and community to build sustainable, continent-scale businesses.

Support ambitious founders with the 'X Factor' – the insight and drive to build billion-dollar companies. Particularly focused on female founders and mixed-gender teams who have been historically underrepresented in VC.

Stage and sector-agnostic fund backing exceptional founders with clear vision and execution ability. Leverages Sahil's 800,000+ newsletter audience, direct founder relationships, and proprietary post-investment support to accelerate high-growth startups.

Backs globally ambitious technology companies from pre-seed and seed through selected growth rounds using specialist EMEA sector teams and a platform model for capital, customers, talent, follow-on investors, and operational support.

We back founders who combine emotional intelligence with business acumen and are on a mission to solve problems they deeply care about. We're often the first institutional check and provide mentorship, community, and long-term partnership support.

Backing the builders of the next layer of computing across AI infrastructure, defense, biotech, and American dynamism. Former 'Software is Eating the World' thesis evolved to 'AI is Eating Software'. Partners with technical founders building foundation models, cloud systems, and infrastructure for the AI era.

Invest in Southern California's best founders earlier than anyone else. No idea is too early. We fund companies earlier than most VCs, providing not just capital but hands-on support and operational expertise. Our founder-first philosophy and No Ghosting Rule ensure responsive, engaged partnerships.

The hardest thing in seed is finding product-market fit. We help you find it. If you already have product-market fit, we will help you scale. We partner with exceptionally ambitious founders for the long run and provide capital combined with operational expertise through our 100+ member Product Council.

Pan-African fund solving the significant funding gap in Seed and pre-Series A investment. Backing ambitious African founders tackling critical continental challenges with operational support and investor network.

We invest in the most promising entrepreneurs building the fastest-growing early-stage startups. We provide cross-border access by connecting founders to resources and networks across the world's most valuable and influential VC markets.

Identify founders with the determination and resourcefulness to build world-changing companies. We believe exceptional founders can come from any background and at any stage of development. Our mission is to help founders be dramatically better shaped in 3 months than when they arrived.

Exceptional founders backed at pre-seed and seed with both capital and hands-on operational support—talent, GTM, fundraising—build the most enduring companies. Pear is founder-first: founders-and-operators turned investors who have been in founders' shoes.

We back visionary technology founders in the Nordic region driven by disruptive forces. Our thesis centers on three areas: New Experiences (gaming, new media, health tech), Platform Technologies (developer tools, infrastructure, fintech, IoT, machine intelligence), and Smarter Workplaces (productivity, developer tools, digital workplaces). As founders and operators ourselves, we bring hands-on operational mentorship to help mitigate risks and navigate building at scale.

Extraordinary founders execute faster when isolated from distractions and provided intensive on-site support. We seek junkyard dogs with high agency, non-obvious vision, delusional optimism, and execution discipline. Category matters far less than founder quality.

Backing exceptional people at the very start of their journey. We support founders from inception to scale through our global residency programs, providing capital, mentorship, and access to a network of 1,500+ companies across six continents.

NYC has tremendous entrepreneurial talent but lacked a structured environment for early-stage founders. ERA provides capital, intense mentorship, and network access to help founders build market-leading companies. Every sector deserves innovation.

Invest in scalable, capital-efficient tech and tech-enabled startups at the Seed stage led by exceptional founders. We identify companies showing early traction that can achieve significant scale with disciplined capital deployment.

We back disruptive founders building category-defining companies. Our approach is founder-first, long-term, and deeply operational. We take the longest view in the room, operate with excellence and integrity, stay curious at the bleeding edge, and invest heavily in building community.

We support founders building the future of open Web3 economies through investment in multichain assets, decentralized systems, and novel blockchain applications.

We invest in world-class founders solving significant problems. We prioritize founder quality, founder-problem fit, and values-aligned partnerships. We help exceptional founders become category leaders early, before they become obvious trends.

We invest in the technologies that are transforming our lives, now and into the future. Founded by a successful entrepreneur and former tech journalist, Supernode backs exceptional founders building innovative technology companies across all sectors, from pre-seed through Series A and beyond.

The best investment opportunities emerge at the intersection of innovation and scale. We invest across the full lifecycle from seed to public markets, focusing on technology companies that will transform sectors globally with particular conviction in AI-enabled platforms and infrastructure.

Back founders from day one with founder-focused support across fundraising, growth, product, and international expansion. We believe diverse founding teams and global thinking drive exceptional returns.

Early-stage venture capital for IT and Biotech companies in Colorado Front Range and Mid-Atlantic. Focus on experienced founding teams solving important problems with potential for significant financial returns. Patient capital approach with operational support and deep regional networks.

Latino founders represent an underserved but exceptionally talented segment of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We invest in visionary founders who combine bold ideas with execution excellence to build scalable, high-impact businesses that create both economic and social value. We believe institutional capital paired with strategic partnership from Fortune 100 executives and operating experts can unlock the full potential of Latino-led innovation.

Investing in subject matter experts shaping the future of their industries. We lead with our values and build trust through action. We believe the best founders have deep industry expertise and need tireless operational support, not just capital. We partner with founders for the long term, staying engaged 24/7.

We invest in companies organized around five concrete objectives: improving worldwide health and happiness, promoting resource sustainability, increasing human potential and productivity, increasing knowledge/empathy/connectedness, and disrupting industries that resist these goals. We operate as both investors and company-builders, providing operational expertise and hands-on support far beyond capital.

Back the brightest early-stage founders under 30. We provide capital, mentorship, and network access to accelerate ambitious young entrepreneurs who graduate from our League of Innovators program or demonstrate exceptional founder quality.

Underestimated founders are systematically mispriced assets that create alpha rather than requiring concessionary returns. We invest in the very best founders who identify as women, people of color, or LGBTQ, treating capital allocation as activism.

We build category-defining companies through a combination of design, product, operations, and capital. We identify market gaps, pair brilliant founders with Expa's studio resources, and help them build companies that reshape entire industries.

We invest at the earliest stages and partner with exceptional entrepreneurs from idea to IPO. We stay small by design to remain aligned with founders. We're sector-agnostic, conviction-driven, capital-efficient, and believe in founder/market fit and intrinsic value over hype.

Back resilient founders building category-defining companies. Leverage Korea's cultural wave for global expansion. When others say 'no', we find the 'yes'.

Global venture capital that invests where talent is abundant but capital and opportunity are not. 500 Global backs technology founders with global ambitions across underinvested, fast-growing markets using Silicon Valley expertise combined with deep local knowledge. Core belief: The best founders and innovation emerge globally, not just Silicon Valley.

Backing the best founders, not just the best-connected. We assess founders on their qualities, not CV or past experience. We focus on founders building solutions for climate equity, economic empowerment, and healthy ageing.

By combining ideas, capital, and talent, we can scale entrepreneurship and build transformational companies. We source 800+ ideas internally, recruit co-founders, and provide day-one operational support in design, engineering, finance, and recruiting.

Empowering entrepreneurs to reimagine the way we live and work by investing in daring technology companies challenging the status quo with permanent capital, lifelong sparring partnership from pre-seed through IPO and beyond.

Lead pre-seed and seed rounds in Canadian B2B software and AI-enabled vertical workflow companies with an initial product in market, early product-market-fit signals, and ambition to scale across North America or globally.

Venture capital should be accessible to exceptional entrepreneurs anywhere. Great companies can be built outside Silicon Valley with the right capital, operational expertise, and network support.

Leading global companies that leverage technological innovation across public and private markets. Proven founders (especially ex-Googlers, AWS, Stripe) with large TAMs (billions+), product-led growth, and global ambitions. Conviction-based investing post-2022 correction emphasizing quality over quantity.

Elevate Ventures partners with innovation-driven founders to provide strategic capital, mentorship, and ecosystem access. Founded by a former founder (Governor Mitch Daniels), the firm believes the best founders exhibit grit, creativity, and coachability. They invest across all sectors and geographies but maintain primary focus on Indiana and Great Lakes Region entrepreneurs building cross-sector innovations.

We are a stage-agnostic venture capital firm investing in exceptional founders building the companies that shape our world.

Rule30 uses a fully algorithmic decision engine to identify outlier founders at pre-seed and seed stages across Europe and North America. The fund removes human bias by analyzing founder experience, educational background, network evolution, and career trajectory — excluding names and photos. The algorithm ranks founders into top 10%, 3%, and 0.1% tiers. An index-style strategy of 75-85 bets targets ≥3x minimum returns with 97.5% confidence.

Great startups can be built anywhere. We believe in founder-centric investing with operational support from a team of successful founders. We serve undernetworked geographic regions.

Equity of access and representation in venture capital delivers positive returns. Diverse and underrepresented (including LGBTQ+) leaders of high-growth companies deserve capital access. When these founders succeed, they influence ecosystems and open doors for historically excluded groups.

MaC backs visionary founders building category-defining companies with deep understanding of cultural shifts, technological advancements, and emerging market trends. Founders must demonstrate authentic insight into why their problem needs solving now, combined with ability to see how the world is changing. Particular focus on founders paying attention to shifts others might miss.

Startups positioned as transformation partners with Fortune 500 corporates create the most impactful solutions. We believe the next generation of market leaders will emerge through collaborative innovation between startups and incumbent enterprises, supported by global expertise and capital.

Culture-Tech companies that disrupt and define how we live, work, play, and interact with the world every day. We invest in passionate founders building transformative products that change cultural behaviors.

Democratize access to venture capital by building large syndicates of non-traditional LPs. Invest across all stages, sectors, and geographies based on founder quality and market conviction, not category restrictions. Enable 2,000+ diverse co-investors to participate alongside marquee firms like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz while maintaining founder-friendly economics.

Invest in early-stage tech companies addressing world's largest market opportunities and solving humanity's biggest challenges. Leverage global distributed team to source, evaluate, and support transformational founders.

Operator-led fund investing in ambitious founders building transformative AI applications. We partner with technical founders who understand AI/ML deeply and are solving real customer problems with capital efficiency. Great product is always the best marketing.

Great companies are built through boring magic — systematic, unglamorous work combining exceptional product design with operational excellence. We pair capital with hands-on product/design expertise and team-building support to help founders execute at venture scale.