Every time we raise a new fund, someone asks the same question: "What's your focus?" They expect an answer like "climate tech" or "enterprise SaaS" or "digital health." When we say "exceptional founders across all sectors," they sometimes squint like we've dodged the question.
We haven't. That answer is the actual thesis. Here's why we built Inprimio this way, what the tradeoffs are, and what it means if you're a founder considering whether to pitch us.
The Problem With Theme Funds at Pre-Seed
Theme-based investing makes a lot of sense at Series A and beyond, where you're evaluating execution capability in a market you know deeply. The metrics are more comparable, the competitive dynamics are more legible, and the pattern recognition from sector experience adds genuine value.
At seed and pre-seed, the opposite is often true. The companies that will matter in five years are frequently operating in spaces where the "obvious" sector narrative hasn't solidified yet. They're at intersections. They're applying a technology approach from one industry to a problem in another. They're founding companies that don't fit neatly into any established category.
If you're a climate fund and a brilliant founder pitches you a company that's technically in the supply chain space but has massive climate implications, your mandate might push you away from the deal. That's a structural problem with theme investing at early stage.
What Sector-Agnostic Actually Means (And Doesn't)
"We don't have a sector focus" is sometimes a euphemism for "we haven't figured out our thesis yet." That's not what we mean. Our thesis is specific, it's just organized around people and problem quality rather than market category.
We look for founders who have unusually good reason to be building what they're building. We look for problems where the status quo is genuinely broken and where a startup approach has a realistic path to beating incumbents. We look for early evidence—even tiny signals—that real customers care.
None of those criteria are sector-dependent. A great founder solving a broken problem in agriculture gets the same evaluation framework as a great founder solving a broken problem in insurance. The sectors are different. The fundamental questions we're trying to answer are the same.
The Portfolio Dynamics Argument
There's also a portfolio construction argument. A fund concentrated in one sector has correlated risk. If the sector narrative sours—as climate tech did in 2023–2024, as crypto did in 2022—a concentrated portfolio takes disproportionate damage. Not because the underlying companies necessarily deserve it, but because the macro sentiment around that category affects follow-on fundraising, acquirer appetite, and even customer behavior.
A diversified portfolio across 11 sectors means that when one narrative cools, the rest of the portfolio is largely insulated. Our 18 portfolio companies span CleanTech, Digital Health, Developer Tools, AgriTech, PropTech, FoodTech, FinTech, AI, EdTech, Insurance Tech, Logistics, and Wellness. When public market sentiment toward any one of those categories swings, maybe two or three companies feel it. The others keep building.
The Network Benefit
Something unexpected happened as we built a cross-sector portfolio: the companies started helping each other in ways a same-sector portfolio couldn't replicate. A founder from our logistics company introduced a developer tools founder to a customer who happened to run a complex fulfillment operation. Our health tech company helped our AI company think through privacy and regulatory questions when they started working with healthcare data.
Cross-sector networks compound in ways that sector-specific networks don't. The same insight applied in two different industries is still valuable twice.
We've seen our founders solve problems faster because someone in a completely different industry already solved the equivalent problem and knew the answer.
What This Means If You're Pitching Us
It means don't pre-filter yourself out because you're not in an industry we've explicitly mentioned. If you're a great founder solving a real problem, we want to hear from you regardless of what sector box you'd check on a funding database.
It also means we'll sometimes ask questions that seem off-sector to you. We might compare your growth strategy to something we've seen in a completely different industry, or ask you to think about your pricing model through a lens drawn from an adjacent market. That's not confusion. That's the cross-sector pattern recognition we've built over the last six years.
The One Thing We Don't Do
We don't invest in sectors that require specialized regulatory expertise we don't have, where early-stage companies face regulatory risk that's not manageable without deep prior experience in that space. There are narrow areas—certain biotech categories, defense, certain financial products—where we're not equipped to be a helpful early investor. We'll tell you that directly if it comes up.
Everything else is fair game. Reach us at [email protected].
