1517 Fund

1517fund.com

VCMatch tracks 1517 Fund as an investor focused on Enterprise SaaS, Hardware, and Biotech companies, Pre-Seed and Seed rounds, North America and Global markets, and $50k to $1m check sizes. Upload your deck to compare your startup against the full private matching profile.

Check Size

$50k to $1m

Stages

Pre-Seed, Seed

Focus Areas

Enterprise SaaS, Hardware, Biotech

Geography

North America and Global

Investment Thesis

1517’s investment philosophy centers on backing people overlooked by traditional institutions — especially college dropouts, uncredentialed founders, and ‘renegade’ or deep-tech scientists — at the earliest stages. The firm emphasizes belief-capital and long-term support: they seed projects before founders are credentialed or widely recognized, couple capital with community/mentorship, and ‘trust’ founders ‘long before any others will.’

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Investment Focus

Who should take a closer look

1517 Fund is most relevant for founders raising Pre-Seed and Seed rounds in Enterprise SaaS, Hardware, Biotech, and Robotics, especially across North America and Global, with public check-size signals around $50k to $1m.

Focus statement

1517 focuses on earliest-stage investments from R&D/idea through Seed in software, hardware with a data play, deep tech / 'sci‑fi' tech, and biotech, and places priority on founder profile over sector: "We're more about the \"who\" than the \"what\"." They write initial checks from $50,000 (idea/R&D) up to $1,000,000 (deep tech/sci‑fi seed), with an average $400,000 pre-seed check.

Value Add

Origins and track record: cofounded by the Thiel Fellowship team (proven history with companies like Ethereum, Figma, Luminar) and explicitly built to scale that Fellowship vision.
Founder-first, anti‑establishment stance: positions itself as an "anti-establishment educational institution" that actively seeks uncredentialed talent and dropouts rather than traditional applicants.
Belief-capital and micro-grants: runs the 1517 Medici Project providing no-strings $1K+ stipends and historically stealth, in-person grants to kickstart projects.
Community + hands-on support: combines investments with a global community of hackers, makers, and renegade scientists, plus events, workshops, office hours, mentoring and post-investment operational support.
Willingness to act early and practically: anecdotal behavior such as wiring money "before the deal docs were done" and meeting founders informally (campus, hackathons, cafes) to give on-the-spot support.