What Is Heavybit?

Heavybit is a venture capital firm and the premiere investor in enterprise infrastructure from the earliest stages. We invest in a different kind of founder: The kind with a unique vision to redefine how teams build, deploy, secure, and scale software. Since 2013, we've continuously launched and scaled 80+ Pre-Seed to Series A startups with hard-won insights and comprehensive, bespoke coaching that leads companies to breakout success. Heavybit and its portfolio companies build the future of technology from the bottom up to the top down.

What Types of Companies Do You Invest in?

We invest in founders seeking a different kind of dollar who build category-defining enterprise infrastructure. We invest in traditional software tools for engineering teams, AI, cloud-native infrastructure, open source, DevOps, and DevSecOps, among others. Heavybit offers hands-on, always-on support in a team-based structured setting, as well as a platform tailored to your specific needs. Heavybit's support network incorporates our unique partnership, an active community of 1,000+ domain-specific advisors, and fellow Heavybit startup founders. We’ve worked with founders in 15 countries and 47 cities.

Learn more about Heavybit's approach to investing in early-stage software startups in this article from our managing director.

When Should I Contact You?

It’s never too early to talk to us. We love to invest on day 0 with the first check but also join companies throughout their early-stage journey.

What Is Your Typical Investment?

We understand every venture is unique and today’s early-stage companies capitalize themselves on different schedules with a variety of instruments at their disposal. We adapt on a company-by-company basis. Our typical initial check size is $500k-$1M in a Pre-seed round, $1M-3M in a Seed round, and $3M-$5M in a Series A. We are hands-on investors who work with a small, concentrated portfolio of companies to provide in-depth support and coaching on all areas of launching and scaling startups. We prefer to lead or co-lead the Pre-Seed and Seed rounds we invest in.

How Does Heavybit Work?

Once Heavybit invests in your company, we begin working with you to build a tailored curriculum and experience. The goal is to help your startup realize its unique potential. Our team provides up-to-the-minute market insights earned over years of continuously launching emerging software categories across a variety of economic cycles. Heavybit founders receive heavy-duty support and coaching from partners, a platform, and a community that is always strategic, substantial, and tailored to your needs.

In broad strokes, this includes a structured approach, a unique community of dev-first founders, and team-level learning and benefits.

A Structured Approach

Goal Setting

Your partners will help you determine your key milestones for the next several months. In many cases, this includes planning for major product and feature releases, pricing and positioning reviews, critical hires, and user acquisition and revenue targets. From here we build a curriculum of weekly activities tailored to your needs.

Board Representation

In the case we take a board seat, we want to offer best practices in board management including creating rigor around effective meetings, key data points, and avoiding board issues. This includes regularly calendared prep and meetings, agenda and deck review, surfacing actionable board requests, and using regular updates to solidify trust and transparency.

Partner Office Hours

Heavybit pre-schedules twice monthly Partner calls (minimum) with our experienced partners, who possess extensive, up-to-the-minute insights into product development, go-to-market strategy, hiring, operations, or any other challenges you might face. The calls ensure that we offer support that is timely, strategic, and actively contribute to your ongoing progress. We also work with you more frequently during critical times for your business.

Tailored Advisor Office Hours

Heavybit has a network of 1,000+ domain-specific advisors. From this pool, we hand-select advisors for you, pre-brief them, and offer hour-long 1:1 meetings to discuss both tactical execution and the implications of your founder-level decisions. Advisors include technical founders and domain experts who’ve scaled developer-first marketing, product, and sales, among others.

A Unique Community of Technical Founders

In addition to our broader community, our portfolio founders include more than 140 technical founders in 47 cities and 15 countries. See our portfolio page for more details. We convene founders in a number of different ways including:

Founder Slack

This is a private, thread-driven Slack channel for Q&A amongst founders. Founders confidentially discuss their immediate challenges, share information like sales comp, pricing strategy, discovery questions, and customer intel.

Founder Events

Heavybit hosts 6-8 in-person founder-only social events each year. Some of these dinners include the entire portfolio, including late-stage alumni founders, and some of these dinners are curated to include a smaller group of founders at a similar stage. This allows for comfortable off-the-record conversations and discussions throughout the year.

Founder 1:1’s

We make regular introductions and facilitate interactions between like-minded founders to ensure that teams can learn from each other and find new ways to partner. Introductions often yield joint promotional activities, intel sharing, and key technical integrations.

Customer Discovery 1:1’s

We also make introductions to select alumni founders to collect enterprise product and discovery feedback and kickstart conversations with prospective customers within the portfolio.

Friends & Family Program

Heavybit’s Friends and Family Program lets portfolio teams offer each other discounted products and support.

Team-Level Learning & Benefits

Library

Heavybit’s library includes 1,400+ educational resources for technical founders and their teams. We encourage teams to study the Library before requesting time with domain-specific advisors.

Speaker Series

These monthly presentations are streamed online live and offer founders and early team members a chance to hear from experts in sales, marketing, and product design. A complete catalog of Speaker Series videos lives in our Library. Founders and teams are encouraged to attend live to ask questions in real time. Speakers are often invited back for 1:1 advisor office sessions in which founders can receive more in-depth and tailored advice.

DevGuild

DevGuild is a twice-yearly conference featuring the CEOs, founders, and top execs at leading technical startups. In the past, we’ve held conferences on community-building, product marketing, pricing, enterprise readiness, content, demand generation, and developer experience. The outcome of these conferences goes beyond immediate learnings, frequently leading to new hires, customers, and users for our member companies. Watch previous DevGuild talks here.

Community Slack

In addition to our main Founder-Only Slack channel, Heavybit’s Community Slack offers channels for early product, marketing, and sales peers to connect and share learning across the portfolio.

Podcast Starter Kit

Heavybit has its own podcast network with shows from a variety of portfolio companies and friendly organizations in Heavybit's orbit. We guide early teams in developing a show’s focus and offer design, editing, and hosting free of charge while a show is getting started We also help teams promote some of their first thought leadership.

Content Course

Heavybit helps early marketing teams create an editorial calendar and develop their content pipeline.

Event Organizer 101

Heavybit offers a primer on event programming, logistics, and promotion. This is typically done in support of your first marketing or community hires.

Vendor Referrals

Heavybit offers portfolio companies access to our network of marketing, design, content, and production vendors.

Diversity and Inclusion

At Heavybit, we believe that diversity is a strength. Learn more about our diversity and inclusion policies below.

Heavybit's D&I Policies

Our Diversity and Inclusion Policy

See our D&I policy here.

Why Inclusion Matters

Read about our commitment to inclusion.

Our Code of Conduct

Read about our code of conduct.