Some founders cannot be stopped.
Those are ours.
Catch the wave early.
Send us the email. > open uplink // patch into the maniac shell ↓We don't back passionate founders. Passion is a hobby. We back the obsessed.
Not company builders. Paradigm builders. They see it because they have been staring at it their whole life. They are already in the future, arguing with it. Everyone who has met them knows where they are.
Impossible is not in the build. They say not yet. They say watch. They say nothing and start building with whatever they can. The work is the signal. They do not quit. They do not panic when the ice thickens. They dig in harder. They get weirder. The problem is real. They play the long game. The short game is for tourists. They are downstream of the signal the feed hasn't caught yet. The future is already transmitting.
Someone is going to meet it at the door. Maniac Ventures exists to make sure it's them.
Want to test if you’re a Maniac? Six questions.
Pick the answer that sounds like you, not the one that sounds smart.
The machine is listening for conviction.
We back the things other funds will back, heavily, years from now. If your wedge is novel silicon, neural decoding, or something that doesn't have a Gartner quadrant yet, the first email goes to Maniac Ventures.
Each name, a Maniac. We picked up the signal early.
Here's the deck we can show.
Including the unicorns we can name.
We won't waste your time.
If any of this is you, we're a bad match.
There are great funds that aren't us. Find them.
The opportunity isn't bolting a copilot onto a 15-year-old CRM. AI means software goes headless. The UI is the API. The user is the agent. The alpha in the wrapper era is already over. Build the AI-native replacement, not the AI feature.
It's a tell. Saying GenAI is for tourists. We want builders, not observers. Operators, not analysts.
If you want a board to tell you what to build, hire one. We invest in conviction, not committees.
If the TAM slide is the strongest slide, the company isn't ready. Tell us about the prototype instead.
Secrecy as identity. The work is the moat. Show us what's running, even if it's running badly.
<quit> in themBeing a founder isn't for everyone. If you can imagine giving up, you will. Imagination is a prophecy. We back founders who are incapable of walking away.
No warm intro. No deck template. No bullshit.
Show me, don’t tell me.
Started surfing the net as a kid. Mid-nineties, dial-up, the net still frontier, still being written by the people living on it. Rode the wire before the wire got gentrified. Just never logged off. Chronically online.
Caught the signal in 2014. University of Toronto, Hinton pilled. Tapped keys in the same labs where AlexNet broke cover, where the weights started working. Saw where deep learning was going before the feed caught up and bet the rest of his life on the trajectory.
Moved to SF. God bless the USA. Got into YC, YCS15. Built ROSS Intelligence, the first foundational AI model for the law. Neural nets. Deep learning. First name on the first AI copyright case ever filed. Thomson Reuters v. ROSS. A monopoly trying to keep the law in a private stack. Six years in. Case still going. The fight is to ensure the law stays free in the AI age. Free the law. Fork the law.
Built Flexpa next. The handshake is coming between patient and agent, and Flexpa wires the protocol. Patient to agent. This is the future of healthcare. Flexpa is the rails.
Founded Maniac Ventures in between. Writing checks on the Maniacs the feed hasn't caught yet. Maniac Ventures is his console, his stake, his deck.
No partners. No LPs. No static between you and the yes.
Offline, wife and three kids. Surfs real water too. Runs on conviction and signal. Catches the wave early and rides it all the way. Netrunner. Optimist. Absolute Maniac.