We dive deep into our sectors. Our research drives our insights and thesis-driven approach.

Broadly, 2023 was a challenging year for property insurers managing exposures to natural catastrophe risks. In some ways, it was a perfect storm (both literally and figuratively) for carriers: a record spike in secondary peril activity occurred alongside historically low supply (and skyrocketing rates) of reinsurance and significant inflation.

While the process for identifying great companies is never uniform, there are indeed best practices to follow in building scalable, defensible companies. At Equal Ventures, one of our core philosophies around identifying companies with breakout potential is evaluating opportunities for perpetual unit economic advantages, or as we like to call them, moats.

In the last year, we’ve seen the high profile bankruptcies of WeWork and Convoy. Each of these were poster-children “disruptors” over the last ZIRP-infused venture cycles, promising to leverage technology to revolutionize massive “antiquated industries, only to ultimately produce economics inferior to the incumbents they were attempting to disrupt. While there is no gratification in seeing billions of dollars lost, I do think these companies provide a healthy lesson for investors to learn from.

One of our LPs often tells me, “Your fund size is your strategy.” I was at a dinner with a long-time investor the other night and he noted, “the NYC seed stage ecosystem used to be so much more collaborative — what happened?” I still see NYC as extremely collaborative, but it’s important to recognize that our collaboration from a decade ago was often the product of scarce resources, not solely altruistic collaboration.

Today, I am excited to announce that Equal Ventures has raised $175m to further our mission to “Bridge the Digital Divide.” These funds are split across two vehicles, $100m for Equal Ventures Fund 2 and $75m for our first Opportunity Fund. Equal Ventures Fund 2 will continue with our core strategy of leading seed investments in climate, insurance, retail and supply chain (with initial investments of $2-3m), while the Opportunity Fund enables us to double-down on our most promising companies in subsequent rounds.