Outsiders Bring A Fresh Perspective

We support early stage founders disrupting overlooked, antiquated and long-standing industries

Technological innovation continues to accelerate, yet the distribution of this innovation is glaringly non-uniform.

The day’s hottest, most visible sectors attract talent, media attention, and venture dollars. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that visibility constitutes importance. Patient perspective, however, leads the observer to understand that hidden sectors and technologies exert outsized impact on our day-to-day lives.

With that, we find the most interesting spaces are those that are overlooked.

Overlooked spaces present mismatches between sector-specific technological adoption and the broader state of technological innovation, thereby creating opportunities to unlock massive value from stale infrastructure. Understanding the hidden complexities and the gaps presented from long-standing incumbents in these sectors excite us.

We believe the best disruptors to build in these sectors are those with outside perspectives.

They rely on grit, curiosity, and unwavering conviction - and aren’t afraid to disrupt the status quo. They bring fresh perspectives, unburdened by the way things have always been done. They bring a cross-pollination of ideas from variegated experiences. At the core, they are the ones willing to put everything on the line to make their vision a reality.

  • Abstract
    Ops

  • Aerovect

  • Andrena

  • Bidsight

  • Casana Care

  • Cognition Controls

  • Dyania Health

  • Flux

  • Juice Labs

  • Perygee

  • Planned

  • Ray
    Secur

  • RootAI

  • Salus

  • Saturday Robotics

  • Saturn Cloud

  • Shelf

  • Summus Global

  • Tango
    Tech

  • Zorus

  • Stealth

Portfolio

Abstract
Ops

The AbstractOps platform helps automate and manage various core corporate functions so team can focus on business strategic initiatives.

Founded

2019

Location

San Francisco, CA

Industry

SaaS

Status

Seed

Aerovect

AeroVect makes ground handling dramatically safer, more productive, and more sustainable with the AeroVect Driver. The industry's most advanced OEM agnostic self-driving software for GSE (ground support equipment).

Founded

2020

Location

San Francisco

Industry

Mobility

Status

Seed

Andrena

Andrena provides high speed internet, at a fraction of the cost. Andrena uses new technology to beam high speed internet, reducing the maintenance costs associated with wired fiber or cable internet and passing these savings on to the end consumer.

Founded

2018

Location

New York, NY

Industry

Infrastructure

Status

Seed

Bidsight

BidSight unlocks the power of collaboration in complex commercial pre-construction processes. BidSight’s platform eliminates manual tracking of pre-construction workflows and acts as a single source of truth for commercial real estate developers, eliminating errors and saving them millions.

Founded

2022

Location

New York, NY

Industry

Construction

Status

Pre-Seed

Casana Care

Casana is unlocking a new category in healthcare technologies that enables effortless, integrated and consistent in-home health monitoring. Casana's 'The Heart Seat' aids patient compliance and assists medical team in care management.

Founded

2019

Location

Rochester, NY

Industry

Remote Monitoring

Status

Series B

Cognition Controls

Cognition creates intuitive HVAC control systems for commercial spaces without building automation systems. Cognition is built on a deep understanding of the math and science of heat exchange in smaller, multi-zone commercial spaces and uses real-time data to continuously forecast and provide optimal commands to the HVAC equipment.

Founded

2020

Location

Norwalk, CT

Industry

HVAC

Status

Seed

Dyania Health

Dyania identifies in real-time patients who match a complex set of criteria to enable participation in condition-specific clinical trials. Dyania’s proprietary NLP understands and extracts unstructured, de-identified data from clinical notes to qualify patient data sets for trial participation, thereby expanding access to innovative therapeutics for patients with life-impairing conditions, as well as saving researchers time and money.

Founded

2019

Location

Los Angeles, CA

Industry

Clinical Research

Status

Seed

Flux

Flux is a web-based EDA solution built collaboration-first. Their platform allows reuse and sharing of components and features a programmable simulator that allows you to quickly build interactive mockups of real-world parts and scenarios.

Founded

2019

Location

San Francisco, CA

Industry

Consumer SaaS

Status

Seed

Juice Labs

Juice democratizes GPU access by creating software that allows easy and efficient access to high-performance and underutilized GPUs. Juice breaks GPUs out of physical lock-in and allows users to access the compute power of any GPU on any server that has Juice installed.

Founded

2020

Location

San Francisco, CA

Industry

Infrastructure

Status

Pre-seed

Perygee

Perygee enables customers to detect anomalies before they spread to an entire network.The platform brings in the appropriate context of every asset on the network alongside a toolkit for IT team to build custom views and automations so that enterprises can adopt and scale security best practices.

Founded

2019

Location

Washington, D.C

Industry

IoT Security

Status

Seed

Planned

Planned streamlines the corporate event planning process from supplier sourcing, budgeting, booking, and overall event management

Founded

2018

Location

Montreal, QC

Industry

Enterprise Tech

Status

Series A

Ray
Secur

RaySecur provides a real-time view into the contents of mail and packages by combining multiple proprietary and state-of-the-art technologies to detect liquids, powders & traditional threats.

Founded

2017

Location

Cambridge, MA

Industry

Security

Status

Series A

RootAI

Root AI builds intelligent robots that solve for persistent agricultural labor shortages, which have been exacerbated by COVID-19 and volatile global immigration policy. Its marquee product, Virgo, is a harvesting robot that identifies and harvests multiple crops by finding the least obstructive and fastest route for its robotic arm and gripper to pick the crop.

Founded

2018

Location

Woburn, MA

Industry

AgTech

Status

Acquired

Salus

SALUS is a simple-to-use safety management platform created for the construction industry. The platform allows for the easy creation and management of digital forms, certificates, and assets. Through the centralized platform customers can get real-time notifications on incidents, assets, and workers; assign corrective actions; track follow-ups; and reduce repeated incidents.

Founded

2018

Location

Vancouver, BC

Industry

Construction

Status

Series A

Saturday Robotics

Saturday Robotics is a robotics company that is currently in stealth

Founded

2018

Location

Allston, CT

Industry

Automation

Status

Series A

Saturn Cloud

Saturn Cloud enables data scientists to overcome computing limitations by providing cloud hosted CPUs/GPUs with DASK. This allows experiments to be run in minutes and not hours by providing speed and scalability using python based DASK clusters.

Founded

2019

Location

New York, NY

Industry

Enterprise

Status

Seed

Shelf

Shelf modernizes and centralizes the knowledge tech stack, integrating all your sources, then pushing content and answers everywhere your employees work. Shelf’s MerlinAI acts as a knowledge assistant, providing answers, responses, and recommendations so employees can always find the answers they need.

Founded

2017

Location

Stamford, CT

Industry

Enterprise

Status

Series B

Summus Global

Summus creates a new category in corporate health benefits, straddling the navigation and second-opinion categories with a physician-led model. Summus’ platform empowers families through direct access to virtual specialist networks across 48 hospitals, from anywhere in the world.

Founded

2015

Location

New York, NY

Industry

Tele-health

Status

Series B

Tango
Tech

Tango serves high-performing team that want a next generation tool to do workflow capture for asynchronous training and knowledge transfer. Tango's platform can be used for on-boarding, knowledge base creation or evaluation.

Founded

2020

Location

Los Angeles, CA

Industry

Enterprise

Status

Seed

Zorus

Zorus protects and monitors a company’s endpoints anywhere their employees work. They deliver enterprise-class web security, exclusively for MSPs. Their technology provides proxy-based web-filtering that combines with custom reporting to give everyone a better user experience.

Founded

2018

Location

Norwalk, CT

Industry

Cybersecurity

Status

Series A

Stealth

Founded

2018

Location

Stealth

Industry

Stealth

Status

Stealth

Founded

Location

Industry

Status

Team

Austin McChord

Managing Partner

Teddy Seem

Managing Partner

Michael Fass

Partner

George Easley

Principal

Lena McDonnell

Sr. Associate

John Goettee

Analyst

Ashley Howes

Strategy & Operations

Austin McChord

Austin McChord is the founder and former CEO of Datto, an innovative provider of comprehensive backup, recovery, and business continuity solutions. Austin founded Datto as a college student in his parent’s basement, growing it to become Connecticut’s first “unicorn”, and led as it’s CEO through its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2017.

Austin is a graduate, trustee, and 2017 commencement speaker of the Rochester Institute of Technology. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015, was named E&Y Technology Entrepreneur of the Year in 2016, and earned recognition as one of the nation's top 50 philanthropists in 2017 by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. McChord holds several patents and has been a featured keynote speaker at technology conferences including Collision, Techonomy, and more.

1 / 7

Teddy Seem

Teddy Seem started his career at Bridgewater Associates where he was initially a forward deployed engineer before transitioning to an investment engineering role building the quantitative models for the Foreign Exchange research team. After Bridgewater, he pursued his interest in machine learning and led the machine learning initiatives at a NYC start-up called Resonance where he focused on building ML models which could interpret, convert and re-process 2-dimensional images.

Teddy holds a B.A. in computer science from Amherst College where he was a member of the varsity lacrosse team, a member of the Glee Club and led the CS Club. He also holds an M.B.A from Harvard Business School.

2 / 7

Michael Fass

Michael is a transformational leader in high growth, global technology environments. He was the sole continuous executive leader at Datto throughout the company’s 9-year journey of scale from a 100 employee tech startup to a global, publicly-traded enterprise. Michael has led teams that created thousands of jobs and multi-billion dollar returns for investors. He is a functional operator with dual specialization in HR and Legal as well as strategic counsel, coach and leader to key stakeholders.

Michael is also a proud husband to Sarah and father to Ethan (college), Owen (high school) and Zeke (middle school), an avid guitar player, singer, songwriter, amateur chef and dog lover.

3 / 7

George Easley

George Easley has worked in financial services since his graduation from college. He comes to Outsiders Fund from ICONIQ Capital - a multi-family office, tech growth equity, and real estate firm based in San Francisco.

He's also an active angel investor, having invested in startups in spaces like telemedicine, cannabis, and proptech, among others. George holds degrees in History and International Development from Dartmouth College, where he also owned, operated, and sold a mattress rental business catering to students.

4 / 7

Lena McDonnell

Lena started her career in the aerospace and defense industry working for Northrop Grumman. She initially worked as a software engineer building simulation models for national security satellites. She then transitioned to space exploration and became a product manager for NASA programs bringing humans back to the lunar surface.

Before entering the space industry Lena started a company of her own called Soterra and served as CEO. Soterra was a communication company, which built a device to connect isolated women in rural developing countries to assistance in emergency situations. Lena also has a B.S. in Computer Science from Lehigh University.

5 / 7

John Goettee

John is an analyst on the investment team helping to drive sourcing and diligence initiatives.

6 / 7

Ashley Howes

Ashley is Head of Operations and Strategy and as such supports the portfolio and helps drive the firms overall growth. She enjoys supporting entrepreneurs through building vibrant communities and helping them through critical roadblocks. She has built and overseen entrepreneurial communities and programming for companies like WeWork and Newlab.

She studied Energy Business and Finance at Penn State where she danced and volunteered for the Penn State Dance Marathon, fondly called THON, benefitting kids with pediatric cancer and was on the Homecoming Executive Committee.

7 / 7