Eniac Ventures is ready for your pitches

By Hadley Harris, Tim Wang, and Anthony Ha

We’re opening our (virtual) doors to any founder who wants to pitch Eniac Ventures.

Starting today, if you’re hoping to raise funding from Eniac, you can just fill out this online form, which asks for basic information like founder background, the problem you’re solving, and the amount you’re looking to raise. Assuming you’ve got your pitch deck ready, the submission process should only take about five minutes.

This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while. As a firm created and led by four startup founders, we understand that the best founding teams aren’t always the ones with deep connections to the VC world. We don’t think it’s fair that anyone — particularly anyone from an underrepresented background — might feel shut out from funding just because they don’t know the right people.

At the same time, it’s important for us to create a workable system that doesn’t inundate our team with more emails than we could ever possibly read. We hope that by using Typeform submissions, we’’ll be able to review every single pitch and provide an answer to each one.

To be clear, this does not represent a change to Eniac’s core investment strategy. We’re not planning to write more checks, and we expect we’ll have to say no to the vast majority of pitches. Still, we hope that by making it easier for anyone to pitch us, we’re doing a little bit to democratize access to venture capital. And even when we don’t invest at a fund level, individual team members may be able to help in other ways, whether that’s through introductions or personal angel checks.

Some things to consider that could improve your odds: Eniac is focused on seed and pre-seed deals with startups that are pre-product market fit (though we have more flexibility when it comes to crypto). And while all kinds of companies are raising VC funding these days, when we say startups, we mean tech startups (as we like to say, we’re looking to invest in bold founders who use code to create transformational companies). Lastly, it couldn’t hurt to learn a little about our team and our portfolio.

This is very much an experiment on our part, so if you have suggestions on how we can improve the submission form or the process, please email Anthony at anthony@eniac.vc. Let the pitching begin!