Announcing The Circle

The Circle is a curated community of former founders, senior operators, and executives who have agreed to lean into our portfolio.

The Circle by Unshackled Ventures

AI is making products faster to build, faster to ship, and faster to copy. The gap between what you build and what your competitor builds is virtually nonexistent. So if the product is no longer your moat, what is?

At Unshackled we believe it is trust. Business has always moved on relationships: the deals that get done, the talent that says yes, the enterprise customer who takes a bet on a 10-person company because someone they trust vouched for them. This is where we believe competitive advantage lives. It’s not only in your feature set or your unique data set or your hard tech, those things get you to the starting line, it will be who you know and who trusts you that gets you beyond the starting line to fuel momentum.

Not all founders start with that network of trust. The founders we back come with extraordinary talent, relentless drive, and outsized resilience. What they do not always have is the 20-year relationship with the VP of Engineering at a Fortune 500 who can fast-track a pilot. Or the former founder who has navigated exactly the pricing problem they are staring at right now at 11pm. Or the person who simply knows the right hire.

And so, we decided to do something about that.

The Circle: a curated community of founders, operators & executives

The Circle is a curated community of former founders, senior operators, and executives who have agreed to lean into our portfolio. Not in a passive, add-your-name-to-a-list kind of way, because almost every VC can claim to have a network like this, but in a real way.

What makes it real: the people who said yes are immigrants themselves, or have built companies alongside immigrants. The instinct to help is a felt experience, a real human desire to reach the hand back and pull our founders up.

The profiles of people who are leaning in are people who have built iconic companies like Docsend, Poshmark, EightSleep, Vercel. Operators who run product and engineering at Shopify, Instagram, Google, and Amazon. Executives at Fortune 500s who control procurement budgets and can open doors that would otherwise take years to get through at companies like Target, Nike, Maersk and many more across every industry our portfolio touches.

Every person here chose to be here. That’s not something we take lightly, which is why we only deploy The Circle where momentum is real and founders find themselves at a true inflection point.

How members have shown up

Some Circle members jump on a 30 minute call to share hard-earned wisdom. Some make warm introductions to potential customers. Some refer world-class talent. Some have become angel investors in specific companies that light them up. Some are advising founders formally. Some are mentoring one-on-one. And some have gone all the way and become LPs in Unshackled.

Everyone is choosing their own adventure. What stays constant is the intention: to show up for these founders in a way that changes their trajectory.

Immigrant founders are building the next generation of iconic companies and now we have something real to offer them beyond capital. We have a community of people who believe it too, and who are willing to do something about it.

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About Unshackled Ventures: Unshackled Ventures is the only venture capital firm built to back immigrant founders from Day 0 — before they have an entity, a network, or an alternative. By solving immigration first, we are the only capital available at that moment, which gives us access others don’t: before consensus, before capital, before competition.

Since 2014, that structural advantage has proven to be a winning investment strategy across 110 investments in the industries that will define the next decade — healthcare AI, supply chain automation, enterprise infrastructure, space, and cancer therapeutics.