Investor profile
Outset Capital
Micro-fund
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Outset Capital is a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed fund led by active AI practitioners and YC founders — Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — who simultaneously build and invest. The firm focuses on AI, devtools, robotics, and the future of work, writing small non-lead checks ($25K–$500K) to be 'the most helpful investor per dollar' on a founder's cap table. Outset is 'excited to invest before anyone else' and deliberately slots in alongside top-tier leads rather than competing with them, always voting with founders and never getting in their way. The partners bring direct operator credibility: Kanjun and Josh co-founded Imbue, a frontier AI lab that has trained 100B+ parameter foundation models and raised over $200M in venture capital, while Ali scaled teams from 200 to 1,200 at Dropbox. Backed by extraordinary founders including Adam D'Angelo (Quora), Drew Houston (Dropbox), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Jonathan Frankle (Databricks), Outset has backed 40+ companies across Fund I and Fund II, with a particular emphasis on helping founders hire their founding engineering teams.
Notable quotes
“We're excited to invest before anyone else. We write small checks (rather than lead rounds), and work to be the most helpful investor per dollar on your team.”
“Enterprise AI isn't 'early' anymore. Menlo Ventures estimates enterprise AI spend will hit $37B in 2025 — more than 3× in a single year. That's not gradual adoption. That's a market snapping out of the experimental phase almost overnight.”
“We've scaled unicorns and taken teams from 0 to 1. We've built foundation models with 100B+ parameters, raised more than $200M in venture capital, and scaled teams from 200 to 1200. There are only three of us, yet we can speak from experience to many of the challenges you'll face.”
Team
Kanjun Qiu
General Partner
Josh Albrecht
General Partner
Recent investments
| Company | Round | Size | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical Intelligence | Seed | — | 2024-03 |
| Browserbase | Seed | — | 2024-04 |
| Hedra | Seed | — | 2025-04 |
| Medra | Seed | — | 2024-12 |
| Tako | Pre-seed | — | 2024-10 |
| Kindred | Seed | — | — |
| MatX | Seed | — | 2023-12 |
| Datology AI | Seed | — | 2023-09 |
| Reflex | Seed | — | — |
| Harper Insure | Pre-seed | — | — |
Frequent co-investors
| VC firm | Deals together |
|---|---|
| Lux Capital | 4 |
| Nat Friedman | 3 |
| Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) | 2 |
| Kleiner Perkins | 1 |
| Sequoia Capital | 1 |
| Index Ventures | 1 |
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