A new venture firm based in the Seattle region wants to support early stage tech startup founders that may be overlooked by other investors.
Isaac Kato, a longtime entrepreneur and investor who previously led the Techstars Seattle accelerator, is the founder and general partner at Two Ravens, which came out of stealth mode this week.
“We love investing in extraordinary, non-obvious founders,” the firm says on its website. It is targeting diverse founders, immigrant founders, and founders located outside of major startup investment hubs such as Silicon Valley or New York City.
A SEC filing from December shows that Two Ravens was raising a $20 million fund.
Kato declined to comment when contacted by GeekWire.
The firm says it typically invests between $250,000-to-$500,000 in each company and it leads, co-leads, or invests in follow-on rounds.
Two Ravens joins a growing list of venture firms aiming to invest in underrepresented founders.
McKinsey published a report last year highlighting the disproportionate funding gaps for Black, Latino and women founders — and demonstrating the potential untapped economic opportunities.
Kato led Techstars Seattle as managing director from 2019 to 2022. During that time he also led Techstars’ Filecoin Accelerator, which aimed to help companies using the IPFS/Filecoin blockchain-based storage network.
Before joining Techstars, Kato was president at MightyAI, a Seattle startup that developed training data for computer vision models and was acquired by Uber in 2019.
Kato joined MightyAI in May 2018 after founding and leading London-based data center company Verne Global for nearly a decade. The Stanford and Harvard grad previously co-founded and sold Sven Technologies in the late 90s before stints at two investment firms.
Two Ravens’ other employee is Carson Nye, who was previously an investment manager at Techstars Seattle, which announced its surprising shutdown in February. Kato told GeekWire at the time that the closure was “a serious loss for our remarkable community.”
“If there is good news here, this resilient and tightly-knit community will almost certainly self-organize to preserve the relationships that have been formed over the past decade and a half,” Kato wrote in a LinkedIn post. “There is ample opportunity for a successor to fill the gap – strong local accelerators such as Techstars Seattle have proven to be immensely helpful to the entrepreneurial communities they serve.”
