We invest in bold technology businesses.
Real businesses make products and sell them for a profit. They focus on customers, revenue and profitability not investors, valuations and the next fundable milestone. Real businesses prioritize their customer’s needs over their customer’s eyeballs. They have a functioning business model, not a believable financial model. Real businesses want to stay in business, not run for the exit. They create their own source of funding and don’t have to ask anyone for permission to exist. We believe real businesses make really great investments.
We typically look for early stage technology or technology-enabled businesses that have been in operations for at least a year or more, have a little revenue (minimum $10k, ideally $20K, as high as $100K anually), and have a high quality team in place.
We like founders that focus on sustainability, unit economics and path to profitability first over reckless and mindless growth. We ideally come in when you have a product launched, and have few customers paying for it.
Companies we've built
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CloudBoost
Cloud platform which helps build apps in half less time. -
Fyipe
Status Page, monitoring and on-call made simple. -
Flow
Build web and mobile app in hours. -
HackerBay Labs
Helping startups and enterprises build software. -
HackerBay University
Tech education. Done right. For free. -
Genosyn
Computational synthetic genomics.
How do we invest?
We aren't your typical investor. We won't force you to flip your business in 3-5 years. We
won't lock you into golden handcuffs or push complex deal terms. We won't ruin your life with weeks
of unnecessary due diligence. We won't renegotiate and grind you on terms and we don't take a board seat.
We keep things dead simple. We'll make an offer within 7 days and close in 30. We wire you the
funds the day we sign the contract. We started HackerBay Ventures to create an investor we wished we had when
we started up.
We sign SAFE's. We usually sign a
SAFE at this stage of the business - it's fair to both founders and us when critical valuation conversations
are deferred to a priced round.
The companies we invest usually fall into three buckets:
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SaaS
You've got your subscription product off the ground and have few paying customers who are using it. You're making some revenue a year and you need more funds to hire people and scale. We usually like companies that can demonstrate unit economics, path to profitability, high margins and a great team.
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Enterprise Software
We have significant experience building enterprise software and selling them. Software used by large companies is still awful and still very lucrative and there's a lot of room for software automation and innovation in every industry. Every vertical is going through some form of information-based disruption; this is causing businesses to modernize their practices, leveraging new data, accelerating key processes, and delivering digitally-enabled experiences in the process.
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Developer Tools
The products software developers use to make software are a powerful lever: they have a dramatic impact on the quality and kind of software being built. We’re interested in helping developers create better software, faster. This includes new ways to write, understand, and collaborate on code, and the next generation of tools and infrastructure for delivering software continuously and reliably. Good way to think about this - What comes after programming languages and frameworks?
If you're concerned your business doesn't fit the bill, feel free to send it to us anyway. We'll take a look and let you know within a couple days if it's a fit.
Sound like a fit? Get in touch