Gaurav Jain wrote the playbook for pre-seed investing. A decade later, he's running one of the industry's most prolific early-stage funds.

Business Insider

14-05-2025

For Gaurav Jain, there's no such thing as "too early" when it comes to making a VC investment.
During the last decade, he's built a reputation as one of the most influential early-stage investors in venture capital: first at Founder Collective, and, since 2016, at Afore Capital, the fund he cofounded to make pre-seed investments at a time where rounds of at that size and dollar amount had a negative connotation in the industry.
Since then, Afore has grown into one of the most active early-stage funds and has backed companies such as Modern Health, Neo, and Hightouch.
Jain said he's always been obsessed with finding the right founders who had great ideas but weren't far enough along to raise a seed round. That thesis eventually became Afore Capital, he said.
Jain ranked No. 2 on Business Insider's Seed 100 list for 2025, which was compiled using data from Termina.
"A lot of founders were telling us that we were too early, but you need money to get traction, and you need traction to get money," Jain told Business Insider. "That became the genesis for us to start Afore Capital."
A career at the early stage
Jain, who was born in India, started his career at Google in 2009. He was one of the earliest product managers at the company's Android division when the mobile platform had fewer than 1 million users. While he was there, he led the Android Nexus product line, a range of phones and tablets that later became Google Pixel.
Jain left Google in 2011 to attend Harvard Business School, with the goal of moving into the world of venture capital. He started working with Founder Collective, a seed-stage fund based in Boston, and joined the firm as principal when he graduated with his MBA in 2013. While at Founder Collective, Jain was directly involved in the firm's investments in Cruise, Socure, Firebase, Airtable, and Smyte.
At the same time, Jain said he was meeting with plenty of founders who seemed like they'd be great bets but weren't yet at the size or scale to raise a seed funding round. At the time, pre-seed rounds weren't as common, and they sometimes carried a negative perception with investors because they were so risky.
Jain, however, saw an opportunity in the market.
"There was this gap in the market, where all of these first-time founders had no celebrity and no meaningful traction," he said. "I saw the problem firsthand, which is how we decided to create a fund dedicated to fixing it."
Creating a market for pre-seed investing
In 2016, Jain teamed up with Anamitra Banerji, a partner at Foundation Capital who'd been Twitter's 25th employee and the company's first product manager.
The two cofounded Afore Capital, a fund specifically dedicated to investing in pre-seed startups. Afore currently has around $500 million in assets under management, and it closed its most recent fund, a $185 million Fund IV, in February. The firm writes checks of up to $2 million.
Afore's portfolio includes Modern Health, a mental health benefits platform for employers that raised a $74 million Series D in 2021 and achieved unicorn status with a $1.17 billion valuation; the Canadian fintech Neo, which raised a 259 million in Canadian dollars Series D at the end of 2024; and the AI marketing platform Hightouch, which in Februrary raised $80 million at a $1.2 billion valuation.
The firm's recent exits include Highlight, a web-monitoring app for developers that was acquired by the software development platform LaunchDarkly in April, and the AI supply-chain startup Factor, which was acquired by the supply-chain logistics platform Cofactr in March.
While Afore is technically a generalist firm — when it comes to backing pre-seed startups, Jain said it doesn't have the luxury of building out an evolved thesis on a specific market or sector — it tends to gravitate toward software investments, which, today, means making a lot of AI bets. Jain added that it's much more important to identify strong founders, whose ideas might change five times before achieving product-market fit.
"At the stage where we invest in, which is pre-traction and pre-revenue, what we are really investing in is the people," Jain said, adding that he looks for founders with a strong growth mindset who can iterate new ideas quickly and take setbacks in stride.
To that end, Afore has a program to support "pre-idea" founders while they search for the right spark to build a startup. If the idea hits, the firm will eventually invest at minimum $100,00 or lead its pre-seed funding round. There's also a college version of the program, in which students can iterate on a startup idea with Afore support instead of completing a traditional summer internship.
"At the pre-seed stage, it's crucial to give founders a safe space if things aren't working," Jain said. "We're backing you, not one rigid idea. We invest the time it takes to get to product-market fit, and our commitment is that we'll be the most active, hands-on investors you'll ever have."