Leadout II

Today is an exciting day for the Leadout Capital team as we announce the closing of Leadout II, our second fund backing founders who are world class customer experts building innovative software solutions. Leadout II is a $57.7M, seed and pre-seed vehicle with the same founder market fit thesis as Leadout I, a $27.5M fund. We welcome new institutional investors Accolade Empowerment Fund, Launch With GS, Foundry Group, J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Atento Capital — and we welcome back Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda French Gates Company.

Leadout’s investment thesis prioritizes founding teams whose world-class customer expertise informs a core insight about how to address a customer need in large end markets with a differentiated software solution. We focus on a founding team’s understanding of a customer need as the highest fidelity signal of product-market fit.

We are high conviction investors driven to back resilient founders who are world-class customer experts building venture-scale businesses. Our founders have a track record of overcoming adversity, leading with empathy and finding innovative ways to win.

Leadout Capital’s origin story is grounded in the opportunity to create outsized value for all stakeholders by supporting underestimated, resilient founders at the beginning of their journeys. As an operator and angel investor, Ali observed a gap in the market between these founders and institutional venture capital. So, we launched Leadout in 2018 to address this gap and unlock its inherent value.

Today, we are proud that over 80% of Leadout I’s investments and 100% of Leadout II’s investments to date have had objectively diverse founding teams. We are open to investing behind all entrepreneurs, regardless of identity, and are glad to increase the availability of early stage capital for a broader set of entrepreneurs.

Leadout Team / Operator Network
In 2021, we expanded the investment team. Steve Brownlie General Partner bringing with him a 20+ year career in investing. And, prominent angel investor, engineering leader and entrepreneur Yun-Fang Juan joined as a Venture Partner.

Leadout Capital also brings the expertise and access to opportunities of a network of operators, founders and builders. We are excited to add six amazing operating executives to our Operator Advisory Council: Houman Fardin (Wealthfront), Ayo Omojola (Carbon Health), Rohini Pandhi (Block), Dan Rosenthal (Stripe), Megan J. Smith (Ex-US CTO), Beth Steinberg (Chime).

Please be in touch if:

• You are raising a pre-seed or seed round of venture capital. Our check sizes range from between $250K up to $1.5M when we are leading
• You are passionate about solving a pain point for a customer you know well and bring a core insight and an evidence based approach to executing on the solution
• You believe in partnership. When you partner with Leadout, you get our whole team. We bring our networks, substantial operating experience and entrepreneurial scrappiness in support of getting to product market fit by helping with go to market and distribution strategy, team and culture development and unlocking your next round of capital