Our Mission
Kayak Ventures invests in founders who are revolutionizing industries or creating entirely new ones.
We are Angel Investors supporting innovative startups at the Pre-Seed and Seed stage.
Our portfolio combines companies from both the tech and climate spaces.
We look for companies with great founding teams, and companies with double-sided value propositions that will continue to diversify revenue as they grow.
Investing in Climate
Climate Tech is a theme, not a single vertical, and it incorporates everything from energy, to sustainability, to carbon reduction. We invest in startups that are replacing products or processes in market with a better solution — one that is cost competitive or cheaper, at the same or better quality, and more sustainable. We also invest in companies that are actively decarbonizing the environment with revenue streams that go beyond carbon credits, and companies that are creating innovative solutions for industries impacted by the climate crisis.
Some of our favorite companies have reinvented everyday materials, providing carbon negative alternatives that are appealing to existing buyers. Others are rapidly reducing the cost of carbon capture and sequestration. We're unafraid to invest in novel hard-tech approaches. We have the ability to vet the feasibility and unit economics of these ventures, and the conviction to back these companies early in their development cycle.
Investing in Tech
Within the traditional Tech space, we focus our investment in platforms and the tools around them. We believe platforms are the biggest opportunities to create and foster new ecosystems. It's no coincidence that the largest tech companies in the world employ platform plays in their core business.
Having established our careers building platform teams at Facebook, we have unique insights into the tools and business models most likely to succeed here. Our work with internal and public platforms — as well as with companies in our portfolio — has shown us how to drive growth, enable customer success, and avoid pricing pitfalls.
Invest With Us
If you'd like to invest alongside us, you can join our AngelList syndicate and be the first to learn about our latest deals.
Who We Are
We are entrepreneurs, operators, and investors with over 30 years of combined experience. We know what it takes to build zero-to-one products and scale up teams from the earliest stages.
Julia has worked with 100+ startups over the last decade. She joined Facebook in 2007 when it was just 200 people, and spent most of her time on the Platform team working with entrepreneurs and developers.
She was part of Facebook's two person fbFund team backed by Accel and Founders Fund. Through that, she helped fund Lyft (IPO-ed), TaskRabbit (acq. by IKEA), Life360 (IPO-ed), and Wildfire (acq. by Google) as well 50+ other teams when they were 2-4 people. fbFund also ran one of the first startup accelerators.
After Facebook, Julia spent 8+ years as founder and CEO at a few startups in the social good, travel, and fashion space. She helped to start Startup UCLA, which is now in its 9th year.
On the advisor side, Julia brings her own founder knowledge to help companies get through their “firsts” (first product, first fundraise, first launch, etc.). Given this, she often meets teams in their first 1-2 years as a company and helps them grow and get to the next level.
After holding engineering roles at a number of early-stage startups, Andrew founded a company providing browser-based statistical analysis tools at a time when single-page web apps were just gaining steam. As CEO, he learned how to grow teams and navigate the challenges of selling to large organizations like universities.
In 2012, he joined Facebook to learn how to maintain large-scale web applications. There, he became one of the first engineers to use React in a production application, setting the path for his career. Over the last decade, he's worked closely with React and associated technologies, driving their adoption and increasing the ways in which they can be leveraged. As an engineering manager across multiple teams, he supported the modern rewrite of facebook.com, as well as the expansion of its underlying framework into a system used by web and native products across Meta.
While working on products like Parse and Oculus, Andrew grew an affinity for tools that help developers and designers get their jobs done faster. Alongside climate technology, this has become his main area of investment focus.
