The Venture Firm That Sells to the Heart Surgeon in Des Moines

The most quoted line in the history of Alumni Ventures is not a mission statement. It is a shrug. Founder Mike Collins likes to describe the way traditional venture capital sees an individual investor: "Why the hell would you bother with a $50,000 check from a heart surgeon in Des Moines?" For decades, the honest answer was that you wouldn't. Institutional funds are built for pensions, endowments and family offices - checks with commas. The surgeon, the dentist, the mid-career engineer with real money but no rolodex, got a polite no.

Alumni Ventures, founded in 2014 and headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire, is what happens when someone decides the shrug is the opportunity. The firm sells venture capital to individuals. Not to a few hand-picked billionaires - to accredited investors writing checks that start near $10,000. In roughly a decade it has committed on the order of $1.5 billion, backed something like 1,400 companies, and quietly landed at #20 on the TIME and CB Insights ranking of America's top venture firms. It did this while breaking almost every rule of how a VC firm is supposed to behave.

The gate was mostly marketing

Start with the premise. The conventional story is that ordinary people can't invest in startups because startups are risky and access is scarce. Alumni Ventures took the second half of that sentence seriously. Good early-stage companies do not lack for capital; they lack for room on the cap table. The scarce resource is not the deal - it is the invitation. So the firm built its entire model around being the easiest possible co-investor to say yes to.

Here is the mechanic. Alumni Ventures does not lead rounds. It does not set terms. It does not take a board seat. Instead it invests alongside a lead firm - frequently the marquee names, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Benchmark - after the hard governance work is done. To a founder, an AV check is friendly money with no strings and no meeting invitations. To the lead investor, it is a co-investor who won't crowd the boardroom. That posture, which sounds like weakness, is the whole strategy. It is what buys access.

What you actually buy

The product is diversification, packaged. Each Alumni Ventures fund holds roughly 20 to 30 companies. An individual doesn't pick a single startup and pray; they buy a basket assembled by the firm's investment teams. Put money into a few funds over a few years and you can end up with exposure to a hundred-plus names - the kind of spread that, in venture, is the difference between a lottery ticket and a portfolio.

The lineup started with school pride. The firm's first fund, Green D Ventures, raised about $1.5 million from Dartmouth alumni - roughly a rounding error against what the firm manages today. It worked because alumni networks are a sourcing and trust engine hiding in plain sight. From there the model was cloned campus by campus, each fund named after a landmark or a color, so that buying in feels a little like buying a jersey.

Over time the offering grew past the quad. The Total Access Fund spreads a single investment across the firm's full deal flow. Focused Funds target sectors - AI, deep tech, healthtech, sports. Syndications let a member handpick one or two deals a month. There is a Women's Fund and an Anti-Bias Fund. In 2025 the firm launched an AI First Fund aimed at startups built around large language models and autonomous agents. The through-line is not a thesis about any one technology. It is a thesis about the buyer.

Who is actually on the other end

The customer is the accredited individual - often an alum, sometimes an institution - who has money to invest but was never going to be handed a Sequoia allocation. The firm reports something like 11,000-plus investors, tens of thousands of syndicate members, and a broader community network north of 850,000 people. That community is not decoration. It is the flywheel: members surface deals, vet companies, and occasionally become customers of the startups they help fund.

There is a psychological product buried in the financial one, and Collins is candid about it. "When you invest $10,000 into Oura, and the company does really well, there's the pride of being really involved in helping something great." The pitch is partly returns and partly belonging - the sense that you got to play a game the velvet rope kept you out of. For a generation that wants its money to mean something, that is not a small feature.

How the firm makes money

The economics look like a fund because they are one. Alumni Ventures charges the equivalent of a 2% annual management fee across a fund's roughly ten-year life, plus about 20% carried interest on profits, and earns additional revenue running fund administration - the tax forms, the reporting, the dashboards that make owning 40 private positions bearable. Third-party estimates put annual revenue somewhere around $15 million, though figures vary by source. Headcount is often cited near 540, with roughly 40 full-time investors spread across about ten teams.

Where it sits in the market

Alumni Ventures lives in the gap between two worlds - the traditional VC fund that only wants institutional LPs, and the equity-crowdfunding platforms where anyone can buy a slice of a single early company. The nearest neighbors are AngelList's syndicates and rolling funds, crowdfunding platforms like Republic, StartEngine and Wefunder, and access vehicles such as Fundrise's venture products. What separates Alumni Ventures is the combination of curation, diversification and co-investment access: you are not betting on one founder's pitch video, you are buying a professionally assembled basket that sits next to name-brand leads.

The names in that portfolio do the marketing on their own: the AI-chip company Groq, the smart-ring maker Oura, the stablecoin issuer Circle, quantum-computing firm Rigetti, and the commercial space venture Axiom Space, among many others. None of these were AV's to lead. All of them were AV's to join - which is exactly the point.

The people who built the side door

The firm reflects its founders, who were themselves outsiders to the club they now sell tickets to. Mike Collins studied engineering at Dartmouth, took an MBA at Harvard, and spent time at the private-equity firm TA Associates before deciding the interesting problem was on the demand side rather than the supply side. He built the first alumni fund by calling people he already knew - fellow Dartmouth grads - and asking them to trust him with $1.5 million. The whole company is arguably that phone call, repeated at national scale.

Co-founder Luke Antal's origin is the kind of detail that tells you about a culture. He joined by cold-calling the company and offering to work for free on nights and weekends, then built the fundraising systems, processes and teams that let a boutique idea turn into an operation with hundreds of employees. He also founded the AV Venture Fellow Program, a training on-ramp designed to widen who gets to work in venture in the first place - a small echo of the firm's larger argument that the industry's gates are more about habit than merit.

That expertise shows up as a manufacturing discipline unusual for venture. Where a classic partnership makes a few concentrated bets a year, Alumni Ventures runs standardized funds, repeatable diligence, and a network of members feeding deals - closer to an assembly line than an atelier. It is one of the most active investors in the country by deal count precisely because the machine is built to be active. The trade-off is deliberate: less concentrated conviction, more spread and access.

For a member, the practical payoff is optionality. You can pick a school fund and back companies with a hometown flavor, choose a sector fund if you have a view on AI or health, use syndications to build your own hand-picked slate, or buy the Total Access Fund and outsource the whole thing. You get quarterly reporting, tax paperwork handled, and a dashboard that turns dozens of illiquid private positions into something you can actually read. None of that removes the underlying risk of early-stage investing - but it removes most of the friction that historically made it impractical for anyone without a family office.

The bet, stated plainly

Strip away the school jerseys and the community language and Alumni Ventures is a distribution insight wearing a fund's clothing. The founders looked at an asset class that had spent a century telling ordinary people to wait outside, and decided the wait was mostly a habit. Whether that democratization is entirely good for the individual investor - venture is illiquid, high-variance, and unforgiving - is a fair debate, and one the fee settlement made concrete. But the model is real, it is large, and it keeps growing. The heart surgeon in Des Moines finally has somewhere to send the check.