The criteria, the terms, and the process, stated plainly.
What we look for, at what stage, and where.
We invest in companies built for a specific vertical industry from day one, not horizontal tools looking for use cases. We back three business models: Vertical AI (industry software with AI driving the critical workflow), Vertical Technology as a Service (AI-enabled services that take the customer's problem off their hands with software-like margins), and Vertical Deep Tech (foundational technology aimed at an industry's hardest physical problems).
We concentrate in regulated, relationship-driven industries where the work is learned by doing: healthcare, financial services, home services, education, logistics, and adjacent verticals.
Today, rewriting an industry almost always means AI: in software, and increasingly in manufacturing, drug discovery, and other physical domains. We have been investing in vertical businesses since 2014, years before the AI wave. We didn't pivot to this; we were already here.
We are usually the first institutional check, and we lead or co-lead.
We reserve significant capital for follow-on rounds, and we target double-digit ownership.
Domain-expert founders live where their industries live. We source heavily in Southern California, the Mountain West, and other under-covered geographies, where capital is scarcer and entry prices are lower. Our offices are in Palo Alto and San Diego.
Hard filters, stated up front.
We don't invest in consumer businesses. We avoid business models that are capital-intensive or that need many years of development before the market can answer back. Pre-product investments are rare for us; pre-revenue with a working product and pilot customers is not. And we don't fund AI demos looking for a use case.
We are cautious where regulatory approval gates the product itself, as distinct from industries that are regulated but buy on trust.
The process, and what kind of partner we are.
Email matthew@vvp.vc with what you're building, who you're building it for, and why now. Cold outreach is welcome. Matt is typically the first call and will route you to the right partner.
The whole partnership engages on every deal, and follow-on decisions are data-driven, not political. Expect us to talk to your customers: we believe the answers are in customers' heads, and we do the work to earn the right to ask hard questions.
And we try to be useful even when we pass. Our reputation is built one founder at a time.
We stay engaged: follow-on fundraising (our companies' later rounds are consistently led by name-brand firms), senior hiring, and enterprise sales motion, which is where most vertical companies live or die.
We underwrite AI businesses as practitioners, not spectators.
Sourcing is AI-native; we cover more ground than a four-person team otherwise could. Diligence uses AI for market mapping, customer-call synthesis, and competitive analysis. Portfolio support and internal operations run on the same stack.
This matters for two reasons. It means our judgment about what AI can and can't do inside a workflow comes from daily use. And it means we hold our portfolio's AI claims to a practitioner's standard, because we know what "AI-powered" should feel like when it's real.
How to learn more about the firm.
Detailed fund information is available to qualified investors through our data room. Prospective investors can reach us at matthew@vvp.vc. Current investors can request reporting and fund documents at the same address.