Mia Lewin

Close your eyes and picture an AI founder who built three startups, had substantial exits, and has just launched a new venture fund specializing in vertical AI.

Keep your eyes closed. This fund celebrated its final close this month with seven investments in its portfolio, some of which were so hot they were oversubscribed in large pre-empted rounds by mega funds like Index, Forerunner, and NEA.

Be honest: What are you picturing?

I bet it's wearing a Patagonia vest.
I bet it's not Mia Lewin.

But Mia is exactly the kind of emerging manager Decile Group believes in and was founded to help unleash.

She's unequivocally good at this. She's built three companies, including StyleGenome, an AI home furnishing and decor company that was acquired by Wayfair. And she's pulled together a team of two full-time partners and a part-time CTO with extraordinary AI chops. 

The partners are Paul Longhenry, a former exec at Tapjoy and Bolt, and Shail Kaveti, a former Wayfair exec, Amazon senior manager, and angel investor in Perplexity. The founding CTO is Jay Bartot, who has founded several Seattle-area startups and was previously a managing director at Madrona Venture Labs. The team has worked together in one way or another for years.

She set out to build a firm, not just raise a fund. Mia was thoughtful about where she took money and who she took it from, despite saying it was substantially harder than raising money as a startup founder.

"We curated a community thoughtfully from our networks of exited founders, CEOs, CTOs, fund managers, heads of data science, and heads of growth across lots of different verticals," she says. "The group is an extension of the four of us. It's a community that can truly help founders. We want to build a long-standing firm. So we thought about: How do we surround ourselves with the right people?"

That community has also attracted founders. They want The Founder VC on their cap table because of the community it's created. The fund holds IYKYK events with capped attendance where a diverse community of people working at the bleeding edge of AI come together and try to figure out where the rapidly evolving industry is going at any given moment.

"There are founders, LPs, and VCs there, and we always hear from people who attend that they appreciate the real talk," she says. "You can build really long-term relationships. There are extremely smart, accomplished, and nice people there. It's really about learning together as the AI landscape is evolving rapidly."

This leads us to another hallmark of The Founder VC that isn't exactly common when a space like AI gets overfunded, overvalued, and inevitably sharp-elbowed: they are collaborative.

"We want to be helpful, not combative," Mia says. The fund is just $5M and their check sizes are $250K at most. Their companies are ambitious and they are going to need a whole lot more deep pockets around the table. So The Founder VC comes into these deals early and helps them build those relationships.

Real talk: Any emerging manager raising money in an extended landscape of a liquidity drought is doing so because the team has something unique that LPs want access to. In this case, it was deal flow and being part of this unique AI community the fund is building, which spans Seattle and the Bay Area, where Mia says some 65% of AI talent is based.

But unique special sauce aside, there are so many elements of The Founder VC's success that are indicative of what's working in the surge of sub-$50M funds that the media largely is ignoring.

Diverse teams (but not for the sake of checking a box): Half the team is female; half the team is male. Forty percent of the LPs are women; one-third are people of color.

"We don't have diversity in our thesis, but we believe in being inclusive," Mia says.

For The Founder VC, it's back to the pre-DEI/DEI-backlash era when it comes to diversity. It's not about checking a box. It's about diversity because it makes the fund stronger.

This is a core belief of Decile Group, which is working hard to make the industry 50-50% when it comes to gender and more reflective of the broader population among all demographics. We have evidence that it works: Mixed-gender teams raise money quicker than only-male or only-female teams.

This has made their community more diverse. And that's leading to unparalleled deal flow, possibly because unlike a lot of AI, it's not a bro-only zone.

BYOLPs (Bring Your Own LPs): According to Mia, one thing that made fundraising for a fund so much harder than for a company is that there's no lead investor who takes the initial risk and takes much of the round, making it safer for others to follow on. Instead, their fund had sixty individual LPs, many investing their savings, several investing in the category for the first time.

"There is a different threshold when you are investing people's savings," she says.

That's true, and it is a challenge. But it's also been an opportunity. Funds like The Founder VC, and the 900+ others we've seen launch through Decile's programs, are too small for traditional institutions. In fact, AI has made companies and funds so much more capital efficient, they are even smaller than funds have been in the past.

That means they've been able to tap a whole new category of LPs that we call "MicroLPs." These are accredited investors, sometimes investing out of their IRAs, who might have invested $50K in a single angel deal before.

Now, they can invest that $50K in a fund and get diversification across 20-30 companies instead of putting all of that behind just one deal. That's not just pulling capital from the angel universe. It's bringing in new capital that was never comfortable putting $50K behind one shot.

It's a level of fundraising that's invisible to research groups like PitchBook because it's a whole new category of LPs. In aggregate, it's billions of dollars. One in four Americans is an accredited investor, and that's increasing rapidly.

A startup mentality, not an investor mentality: "This is my fourth startup," Mia says. While raising money as a fund manager versus raising money to build a product is inherently different, Mia thinks of the way she builds this firm the way she's thought of building her startups.

With a fund in the $5M range, you aren't making a lot of management fees initially. You are investing sweat equity from day one, the way bootstrapped founders do. You win when your investors do. You are hustling to prove yourself, just like a founder.

You are not in the golfing era of your career. You are still grinding. These founders are reinventing the industry as much as they are expanding the idea of what a VC looks like.

Specialists over Generalists: We don't have to say it because the rest of the media keeps saying it. Apparently, it's a terrible time to be a VC.

That's not what we are seeing at the sub-$100M fund level. And it's because the ones we see succeeding, like The Founder VC, are leaning into their specialist chops. Mia's team is a great example of this.

"We've all built and exited AI startups," she says. "We've built zero-to-one companies to multi-billion dollar scale. We have deep networks in Seattle and Silicon Valley. And we are going to stay small and lean. How many funds can say those three specific things?"