Explore What We’re Building

True Ventures backs founders early, when most people aren’t ready to believe.

For twenty years, we’ve written first checks to more than 1,000 founders while their ideas are still taking shape, across software, AI, biology, hardware, consumer, enterprise, robotics, energy, defense and more.

THE NETWORK YOU JOIN

Founders who pick up when you call.

When you take a check from True, you join the founders on this map. Many of them are a few years ahead of you. They’ll give you a read on your market, introduce you to a first customer, or help you make your next hire. Seventy have come back to build another company with us, and many send us their friends.

Each line on the map is a founder who sent us another founder, over twenty years.

Enterprise AppsInfrastructure SoftwareData Centers & EnergySpace & DefenseConsumerBio & HealthRobotics & Hardware

Before it’s a market

The biggest markets are usually the ones still forming. A pedometer. A doorbell. A coffee cart. Deep learning on the genome in 2015. Medicinal plants, decoded molecule by molecule. We back the founder before anyone calls it a market.

  1. 2006Automattic. A blogging tool. The open web, before anyone called it that.
  2. 2008Fitbit. A pedometer. Nobody called it health yet. IPO · NYSE: FIT → ACQ · NASDAQ: GOOGL
  3. 2010Duo Security. Two-factor login people didn’t hate. Security as a product. ACQ · NASDAQ: CSCO
  4. 2012Blue Bottle Coffee. A coffee cart in Oakland. Early is not only technology. ACQ · SIX: NESN
  5. 2013HashiCorp. A founder determined to change how the world builds and runs software. IPO · NASDAQ: HCP → ACQ · NYSE: IBM
  6. 2014Ring. A doorbell. With an app. A founder’s ambition to make whole neighborhoods safer. ACQ · NASDAQ: AMZN
  7. 2015ICEYE. Radar satellites the size of a suitcase. Founders determined to put the whole planet in view.
  8. 2015Deep Genomics. Deep learning to read the genome. Our first AI investment.
  9. 2015Peloton. An exercise bike with a screen on it. Founders who saw a movement, not just a machine. IPO · NASDAQ: PTON
  10. 2015Handshake. A career network for students employers overlooked. Now the largest, most trusted network for careers in the AI economy.
  11. 2018Bear Flag Robotics. Self-driving tractors. Founders who built robots for real work on real farms. ACQ · NYSE: DE
  12. 2020Enveda. Medicinal plants, decoded with AI. A founder convinced nature held medicines the world was missing.
  13. 2021Basecamp Research. DNA sequenced on an ice cap. Two founders turning nature’s diversity into AI that designs medicines.
  14. 2024Bluesky. A social network built on a conviction that people, not platforms, should be in control.
  15. 2025Sandbar. A wearable for talking to AI. Founders imagining a future beyond the screen. Too early to have a name.
  16. 2025Polsia. AI that runs a company. A founder betting that ambition matters more than headcount.

How we work

In at the start. We partner with founders when the company is still an idea, a hypothesis or a few people around a table. We lead pre-seed and seed rounds, usually as the first institutional investor.

Built by founders. True was built by founders and builders. We know the work is messy and the company belongs to the people building it. Our job is to give straight advice, work hard, and open doors.

We win together. We back founders who want to build the defining company in their market, and we work as hard as they do to get there. No partner owns a deal, so every founder gets the whole partnership from the first meeting on.

Here for the long run. The first check is the beginning. We’re still there for the hard decisions years later, and often for your next company.