Primary has, from our beginnings, never looked like a traditional VC firm. My co-founder Ben and I always liked it that way, and as we’ve scaled, we’ve leaned ever-harder into those differences. Today, I’m thrilled to share that we have taken the next step in scaling our firm and in breaking the norms of our industry as we announce our fifth set of funds. At $625M, this represents the largest standalone seed firm in the market and a ringing endorsement by our LPs of our ambition to build the biggest, most impactful, and best performing seed firm on the planet.
Today, Primary leads pre-seed and seed rounds across tech sectors, backing exceptional founders from San Francisco to Tel Aviv. We practice the craft of seed investing at institutional scale. On our way to 80 full time employees, we are led by a team of eight exceptional, sector-focused investing partners, each running their own strategies and partnering with the very best founders in their sectors: Financial Services, Healthcare, Vertical AI, Infrastructure/Compute, Cybersecurity, Consumer, GTM Tech, and the Industrial Evolution. Our partners bring deep insights, extensive networks, and curious, prepared minds to their craft.
Super-charging our investing work is an Impact team, led by a C-suite of seasoned operators, that delivers operational support unequaled at any stage of venture. And tightly aligned with both teams is PrimaryLabs, our incubation engine, which in recent years has launched many of the most exciting companies in our portfolio. In aggregate, Primary is a team with more scale, more muscle, and more ability to drive genuine results in support of founders than any in the market.
At 10x the size from our first fund, we are beyond what Ben and I imagined when we began working on Primary. We were never remotely interested in building a typical venture capital firm. We joined forces because we wanted to build something that changed the way the industry operated, putting the founder at the center. Our most important firm value has always been “Wear the Founder’s Shoes.” Guided by that, we listened to founders and invested in the capabilities they most valued across talent acquisition, revenue generation, and capital raising.
As our early investments began to bear fruit – 9 of the 25 investments in our first fund reached unicorn status and another two achieved cash exits north of $500M – our conviction grew. The unique way we made operating resources available to founders was making a difference. With conviction came ambition to push further, for we knew that our model would get even better with scale. As we’ve scaled, we’ve resisted the temptation that unfortunately defines our industry: using new management fee resources not to execute better for founders, but to further line the pockets of the very investors whose incentives now drive them away from seed and towards larger/later deals. Instead, we’ve grown our team and capabilities in line with the growth of our funds.
This year our team will make hundreds of hires, drive tens of millions of dollars of revenue pipeline, and support dozens of new financings for our companies. As we all race to find and earn the right to work with the founders who are driving the AI revolution, Primary is showing up with more capability and more expertise than ever. And at a time when many firms are struggling to raise capital, our existing LPs have doubled down on our strategy and several amazing, mission-driven institutions have joined us as LPs for the first time.
We are eleven years into an amazing journey at Primary. Every year we relearn the original lesson of venture: success is all about the founders with whom you partner. Our journey has been defined by a remarkable collection of founders and the successes they’ve delivered for our LPs. Our mission has been to support them with everything we’ve got. We feel truly blessed that the unconventional strategic bets we made early on have resonated with founders and paid off in earning us their partnership.
We sit today with a unique market position in the midst of what is by a vast margin the most exciting and important moment in the history of information technology. And we’re not stopping building. We never will. We’re rapidly reinventing everything about how we operate for an agentic future, building new products, new technologies, and new capabilities internally, all in service of continuing to offer something even better in support of world-class founders (more coming here soon).
We are eternally grateful to the LPs who have entrusted us with their capital and given us the right to continue to add our own dent to the universe in service of founders. Fund V is bigger than ever, and we fully expect it to be better, as well. We can’t wait to meet the founders defining a new generation of innovation and magic in our world.
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