When we initially launched Counterpart in 2018, we were fatigued by this corporate stigma and turned our backs on CVC. That was a strategic error, as we lacked fund differentiation. We had to ask ourselves, “What is our real edge?” We decided to host the first Counter event in November 2018 and begged ~30 corporate investors to attend. It was a non-obvious bet, which is now obvious.

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That bet has now transformed into Counter Club: 650+ unique global CVCs represented by 1,500+ investors. CVC represents the eyes and ears for a corporation's near-term innovation strategy. This naturally creates opportunities for collaboration pre and post investment with corporates.

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We are not a CVC or service provider, but a pure-play, institutionally backed financial VC with unfair access to CVC benefits. First and foremost, we are a pure play institutional fund with an edge.

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Today, we’re proud to announce Fund III with over $132M raised.

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We’ve now crossed $250M in assets under management, creeping toward $300M, and have quietly become the best in the world at bridging traditional VC and corporate VC. With our fresh capital, we’re looking for Seed & Series A enterprise software companies that are bringing disruptive AI-native solutions to antiquated industries.

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We're tremendously thankful to our wonderful LPs for their continued support and alignment in our mission. Your conviction in our strategy give us the sense of belief and we're excited to continue on this journey together.

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Building off the Success of Fund I & II

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Looking back at our inaugural Fund I in 2018, we have already returned the capital and more.

We matured into Fund II with multiple exits, including Annex Cloud (Acquired: Open Gate Capital), Glidian (Acquired: Infinx), Intricately (Acquired: HG Insights), Rippey AI (Acquired: PayCargo)and Sense 360 (Acquired: Medallia, NYSE: MDLA).

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???Comment: Include Fund II investments as well: Sqldbm/ Invent/ Soulside/ etc.

??? Fund III Outlook: Focus on Enterprise AI-- not sure what exactly is supposed to go in this transition?

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The Why Now is Obvious:

The enterprise is at a turning point. When the CEO of one of the world's largest businesses says...

"We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company." - Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon. June 17, 2025

...we must pay attention. The AI transformation is well underway and we have already placed several bets in transformational companies across healthcare, manufacturing, retail and more. Our proprietary sourcing network and corporate connections give us unrivaled access into the future of the enterprise. We utilize our knowledge of corporate strategy to make unique connections between our founders, prospects and corporations.

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Fund III is live, active, and already investing—recent investments from the past couple months include BudgieHealth (Seed), InfinitForm (Seed), Zelody (Pre-Seed).

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More about our Latest Investments

Modernizing the benefits ecosystem by giving employers smarter tools to manage and optimize healthcare spending

Founder: George Spurling and Chaim Kirby

Round: Seed

budgie-health.com/

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Gen-AI design manufacturing software for simulation and topology optimization in traditional manufacturing.

Founder: Michael Bogomolny Ph.D.

‍Round: Seed
infinitform.com

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A next gen data orchestration platform for banks and financial services that transforms data through the power of AI.

Founder: Ann Olinger

‍Round: Pre-Seed

zelody.com

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AI inventory management, retail analytics, merchandising and pricing.

Founder: Gurhan Kok

Round: Series B

invent.ai

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Generative conversational-AI for group-based behavioral and mental health.

Founders: Surabhi Bhandari and Anurag Verma

Round: Seed (Lead Investor)

soulside.ai

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AI comms-loop on customer & prospect feedback for B2B businesses.

Founders: Eli Portnoy and Wendell Hicken

Round: Pre-Seed

backengine.com

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How Are We Different? Enter: Counter Club

Founders care about three things; Customers, Capital and Talent. We’ve doubled down on the first two.

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Our Counter Community provides 4 unique access points as institutional investors:

1. Deal Flow: Proprietary network of 600+ active CVCs feeds our top of funnel pipeline.
2. Diligence: Direct access to domain experts
3. Customer Introductions & Strategic Partnerships: Entry point for enterprise and mid-market logos. A clever hack to scale a BD platform.
4. Raising Follow-on Capital: Pole position for potential upstream capital, corp dev connections.

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What matters most to founders post investment is the access to #3 and #4. We not only fast-track this dialogue with the right access point, but we can also secure fast “no’s,” which save you time (so precious to founders). The biggest frustration with corporates is the “slow maybe” and unknown.

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This brings together the Counter Club Flywheel:

What’s in it for our CVCs?

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We believe by creating upfront value with thought leadership through 1:1 conversations, content, and conferences to our private invite only network we built trust.

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Conference: Counter VI and CVC Week

Our flagship conference which has morphed into our very first CVC Week from 8-12 September 2025 in San Francisco. A dedicated week in the calendar of corporate venture capitalists where 1000+ investors will descend on the SF Bay Area. Culminating in our annual conference Counter VI at the Saint Joseph's Art Society on September 10th. Corporate VCs can join the Counter Club to register for one of the many events taking place.

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Content: The CVC Playbook

We recently launched the first three chapters of The CVC Playbook, our authentic blueprint for corporations on how to launch or adapt a CVC fund. We’ve always believed that the best way to build something lasting is to build it together. For the past six years, hundreds of corporate investors have participated in conversations at our events to share what they’ve learned. They’ve talked about what worked, what didn’t, and what they’d do differently. We have captured all of this information and distilled into into The CVC Playbook.

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Each chapter is packed with tactical insight pulled directly from Counter Club contributors who’ve done the work. Our first three modules live today include:

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1. How to Launch a CVC Fund
2. How to Build Your Reputation and Position Your Fund (Internally & Externally)
3. How to do Early Stage Investing Right

The CVC Playbook is live on counterclub.vc, available exclusively to qualified corporate investors at no cost.

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Community: counterclub.vc

The online platform hosts a plethora of online and offline content and events for our investors along with 1:1 matchmaking opportunities.

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Final Words

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To Corporate Investors: Join the Counter Club, The Community Driven Network of CVCs

Everything we offer—educational content, global events, curated matchmaking, and trusted deal flow—is 100% free and made possible by our partners and members giving back their learned experience. If you’re not already in the room, it’s time to ask why.

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To Founders: We Welcome Your Pitch

If you’re founder building in the new era of AI to dis-intermediate legacy solutions within the enterprise, we want to hear from you. Please reach out to a member of the team - warm intro's are always preferred.

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—
Counterpart Ventures

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Not used from V2:

Our premise in 2018 was simple: invest in technologies with the capacity to disrupt enterprise businesses in sectors neglected by innovation. To do this we needed to understand the enterprise. So we set out to build the largest corporate network of any traditional venture capital fund in the SF Bay Area. Fast forward 7+ years and the Counter Club represents the largest community of predominantly corporate VCs, but also includes business development, corp dev, M&A and other investment professionals anywhere in the world.

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CVC represents the eyes and ears for a corporation's near term innovation strategy. We have helped launch numerous CVC funds over the last 7 years and advised countless corporate investors on the day-to-day challenges associated with running a CVC fund. Throughout this process we have sought co-investment opportunities, diligenced deals and introduced prospective investments to CVCs in our network. Our investment strategy has adapted to the needs of the enterprise - and with the AI frontier already on our doorstep we are embarking on an ambitious journey to invest in the next herd of AI unicorns.

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What are We Excited About?

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We will continue to focus on Seed and Series A stage investments where we can play a pivotal role in the growth trajectory of our portfolio companies. Our mandate is to open doors for our portfolio companies to potential customers and everything associated with that mission. This includes support on GTM, business development, recruiting and other operational tasks required in the earliest days. We're delighted to welcome our Operating Partner Al Lalani, who joins us after he sold our portfolio company Annex Cloud, bringing years of leadership and operational experience to the team.

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We aim to keep ourselves accountable too. On our About page you will see we're tracking our favors granted, intro's made and more.

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We're investing in founding teams with strong domain knowledge of the problem they're solving for - backed by a deeply technical team ideally with a live product in-market or a working prototype. We look for a sense of repeatability. Can your product sell across a number of different sectors, geo's or broadly within one vertical if the TAM is large enough? Yes, like most other VCs, we are investing in AI businesses but we are largely pragmatic about real-world application rather than over-hyped buzz words with little substance. We still fundamentally believe that Team is the biggest alpha early on as the rate of change and rapid pace of innovation will see many companies pivot and disappear at a faster rate than ever before.

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Not Used from V1:

In 2017, before Counterpart Ventures even existed, we found ourselves hosting a couple of coffee chats a week with corporate venture capitalists. No fundraising agendas—just honest conversations with trusted relationships based on our two founding general partners' backgrounds leading Qualcomm Ventures and Recruit Strategic Partners. We began to jokingly call these recurring meetings “CVC therapy sessions.”

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When we initially launched Counterpart in 2018, we were fatigued by this corporate stigma and turned our backs on CVC. That was a strategic error, as we lacked fund differentiation. We had to ask ourselves, “What is our real edge?” We decided to host the first Counter event in November 2018 and begged ~30 corporate investors to attend. It was a non-obvious bet, which is now obvious.

‍

That bet has now transformed into Counter Club: 650+ unique global CVCs represented by 1,500+ investors. Last week, we launched the CVC Playbook, a series of educational modules that demystify CVC and unlock insights for corporates looking to launch a new fund or expand an existing one. This September, we will welcome 600+ investors to SF for our annual event, Counter VI, which has morphed into the premier gathering of CVCs in the world. Later this year, we will continue our Global Counter Series, including events in London, Japan and Singapore.

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Budgie Health is modernizing the benefits ecosystem—an industry long plagued by opacity and inefficiency—by giving employers smarter tools to manage and optimize healthcare spending. InfinitForm is redefining how manufacturing workflows are built and scaled, offering a no-code platform that empowers teams to automate complex processes in record time. And Zelody is bringing modern data orchestration to banks and financial services— using AI to turn legacy data chaos into a streamlined, centralized, system.

Counter Club 🤝 What Founders Actually Need: Customers and Capital

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Founders don’t care about fancy platforms. They care about solving the problems that keep them up at night:

1. Recruiting top-tier talent
2. Landing customers to drive revenue
3. Raising follow-on capital to keep building

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Most VC “Value-add” Platforms fail to address these three needs or have more style than substance. But we think of it differently. We believe CVC can be the ultimate platform if done right, unlocking the latter two in a unique and clever way.

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The Counter Community is a Trojan horse for both enterprise customers and upstream capital. We not only fast-track this dialogue with the right access point, but we can also secure fast “no’s,” which save you time (so precious to founders). The biggest frustration with corporates is the “slow maybe” and unknown.

This creates real, quantifiable value:

●        Revenue through commercial deals

●        Strategic validation through corporate engagement

●        Liquidity through late-stage capital or M&A optionality

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In addition to customers and capital(post-investment), the Counter community unlocks value pre-investment through deal sourcing and diligence. This completes the Counter flywheel, powered by the 1,500+ corporate investors in our community.

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In a sea of commodity capital, we offer something different: A platform that creates strategic leverage for founders. A flywheel that spins faster with every investment.

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How it all Comes Together During Counter VI and CVC Week

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This Counter flywheel will be in action on Founder Day around our annual event. We’re hosting a Founder x CVC Matchmaking side event, breaking the room up into relevant sector pods where founders will be seated and corporate investors will rotate, giving them a chance for one-on-one conversations.

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It’s part of CVC Week, an entire week of CVC-themed events in the San Francisco Bay Area from September 8-12^th and the largest gathering of CVCs in the world. Consisting of closed-door sessions on niche topics to industry-themed happy hours and a portfolio development side event, this will be our biggest program of events ever.

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While community members will host many events throughout the week, the main day of the conference, hosted by Counterpart Ventures, will be on September 10^th. Corporate VCs can register now on the counterclub.vc events page.

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The CVC Playbook: Demystifying Corporate Venture

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At Counter Club, we’ve always believed that the best way to build something lasting is to build it together. For the past six years, hundreds of corporate investors have shown up—openly, honestly, and without ego—to share what they’ve learned. From launching new funds to post-mortems, they’ve talked about what worked, what didn’t, and what they’d do differently.

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These aren’t panel soundbites. These are lessons earned the hard way—through lived experience. And now, we’re unlocking that knowledge in a step-by-step format.

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Introducing the CVC Playbook:
A first-of-its-kind immersive learning series designed to demystify corporate venture capital. Whether you're setting up a fund for the first time or navigating your next phase of growth, this is the resource CVC leaders have always wanted—all enabled by community members without consulting or participation fees.

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Each chapter is packed with tactical insight pulled directly from Counter Club contributors who’ve done the work. Our first three modules live today include:

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1. How to Launch a CVC Fund

2. How to build your reputation and position your fund (internally & externally)

3. How to do Early Stage Investing Right

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These lessons are live on our portal at counterclub.vc, available exclusively to qualified corporate investors. No cost. Just the best thinking in corporate venture.

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If you’re building disruptive AI-native solutions for antiquated industries, let’s talk.

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—
The Counterpart Ventures Team: Patrick, Joe, Mikey, Tanvi, Abbie and Nandini

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