Esther Ventures

It’s always best to reach out to us through a mutual connection. Introductions and strong recommendations help in this business. Feel free, though, to introduce yourself. We are open to connecting with founders and innovators.

Send us an investor deck (10-15 slides) summarizing the opportunity (in no particular order): product vision, inspiration for the idea, market potential, team, ecosystem/competition, fundraising specifics, etc. If you have an alpha or a prototype, allow us access so we can test it ourselves or point us to a video featuring your product.

We will take a first pass look at your material to establish if the opportunity meets our core criteria: sectors, geography, stage, size of the investment. We will move quickly to assess with you if there is any risk of competition or overlap. Given our active involvement with our companies – especially at the early stage, we avoid any overlap or risk of conflict of interest at the time of the investment

If we think there is potential for collaboration, we will invite you to visit us. Typically, you will have an initial meeting with one member of our team.

Successful investor meetings will lead to additional conversations with the remainder of our team (you’ll meet everyone!), contacts with (non-competing) experts in our network, reference checks, etc. One of the goals of our diligence cycle is spending time together to make sure that we have “compatible personalities” – most of our companies will spend 5 to 7 years in the portfolio, so a great personal relationship is paramount. We encourage you to go through the same level of due diligence on us. We are happy to make any of our existing or former CEOs available to you as potential references.

If everything checks out (for both sides), we’ll talk terms. If the discussion is satisfactory to both sides, we’ll commit to your round and will invest once the legal documents have been drafted by your counsel and reviewed by the law firm representing the investors.

This overall process typically takes two to three months to wrap up, but we have occasionally made investment decisions faster when the situation required it. We try to respond to most of the opportunities we receive.

We are often asked if we “do” convertible notes, the answer is yes. We vastly prefer equity rounds, but we’ll agree to convertible notes provided that they include a agreement on the valuation of the company at the time of the investment and setting that price as the maximum price we’ll pay for our equity when our investment converts. We don’t sign NDAs for an initial meeting.