Dear Unshackled community and immigrant entrepreneurs,
This is a challenging time. A time that is causing many of us to assess where our priorities can make the greatest impact on our collective humanity. For us at Unshackled Ventures, it means amplifying our efforts to support the immigrant entrepreneurial community. After speaking to our portfolio founders, investors, and internally as a team, our mission became clear:
Unshackled Ventures needs to be as active as ever and ready to do more.
Over the next 12-18 months, we will make 20-30 more Day 0* investments of $200-$300K into visionary immigrant founders and/or teams who are ready to tackle hard problems - the harder the problem, the more we want to see it.
We admire founders taking on ambitious challenges, especially those that can move our world forward in these challenging times. This includes all hardware and software ideas in industries like healthcare, logistics, automation, future of work, therapeutics, education, infrastructure, telco, etc.
Since launching Unshackled Ventures over 5 years ago, we’ve come to learn an important lesson - many immigrants (or teams with immigrants) have lived through challenging times and emerge with a renewed sense of imagination and purpose. Now is no different. And we are proud to continue to do what we do best: to support early immigrant founders that could use our help, especially in this tough climate.
To maintain our highest level of customer service, responsiveness and focus, we’re pleased to share that we have added three new team members — two Analysts (ex-Learn Capital and Facemoji) who will be focusing on deal flow evaluation and founder support, and an Associate (ex-First Round Capital) who will be sourcing new deals, building our pre and post-investment community and focusing on proactive programming for our founders and their teams. These additions allow us to rise to the moment with passion and perseverance.
If you or someone you know has a unique perspective to tackle a difficult problem and believe you are “the only one(s) to solve it” — pitch us. We respond to every cold and warm opportunity.
With love to you and yours,
The Unshackled Ventures team
*Day 0: pre-product, pre-revenue and yes, even pre-incorporated businesses. Consider us your friends and family who aren’t afraid to support you as you experiment in any industry or vertical. We also call this a “pre-seed” financing.
If you want to learn more about programs we run, please check out our Roundtable Program (a safe place for visa-holding founders to learn how to start a Company) and our University Fellowship Program (a program designed to reach the next generation of entrepreneurs at our university campuses). We are proud to continue to create programs and strategies that help more immigrants enter the top of our funnel and start businesses in the U.S.
I know the Learn Capital folks... who joined?