Half a Billion Dollars, One Zip Code, and a Bet That Talent Is Everywhere

Most venture capital lands in a handful of the same zip codes. Atento Capital pointed the money somewhere else. Backed by a single Oklahoma family foundation, the firm has deployed more than $500 million since 2018 - into 66 companies and 35 venture funds and studios - from a headquarters in downtown Tulsa. Then it did the thing that makes other investors raise an eyebrow: it started paying founders to move there.

The pitch is compact enough to fit on a bumper sticker: unsung potential is everywhere; the capital just hasn't followed it yet. Atento's whole structure is an argument that the sentence is literally true. It writes pre-seed and seed checks - roughly $250,000 to $3 million - with a stated emphasis on healthcare, climate tech, and what it broadly calls transformational technology. And it runs a program that recruits deep-tech founders from across Latin America to establish their US headquarters in Oklahoma.

01One LP, two goals

Start with the money, because the money is the strange part. Atento Capital has exactly one limited partner: the George Kaiser Family Foundation, a multibillion-dollar Tulsa institution. Most venture funds answer to a spread of pensions, endowments, and rich individuals who want one thing - returns. Atento answers to a foundation that wants two: competitive venture returns and measurable economic development in Tulsa.

That dual mandate is not a marketing footnote. It changes what the firm optimizes for. A traditional fund has a clock - raise, deploy, exit, return capital, raise again. A single-foundation backer lets Atento behave more like an evergreen balance sheet, patient enough to underwrite the years it takes for a city's startup scene to compound. The trade is accountability on a second axis: jobs and companies that actually stay.

Unlocking unsung potential, everywhere. Atento Capital's stated mission

That framing points the firm toward founders other investors overlook. By its own account, Atento directs nearly half of its capital to underrepresented founders, including women and founders of color. The team assembled to do it is unusually diverse for the industry, spanning several countries and languages - a practical asset when your pipeline runs through Buenos Aires and Santiago as much as San Francisco.

02The $100 million fund, split in two

In 2023 the firm put structure on the thesis with a $100 million fund. The split tells you how it thinks about risk. Roughly $20 million is reserved for the earliest, riskiest pre-seed bets. The remaining $80 million goes to early-stage companies and to fund-of-fund positions - capital committed to other managers and venture studios that widen the top of Atento's funnel.

The fund-of-funds line is the quiet lever. By backing 35 external funds and studios, Atento buys a wider aperture than any single team could scout on its own - and, in the bargain, gives dozens of other managers a reason to route deals and founders toward Tulsa. It is deal flow and gravity in the same instrument.

03Pay them to move - keep the equity

Atento's flagship program, Latam to Tulsa, is where the strategy stops being abstract. It recruits early-stage founders - largely from hard-science and life-science fields - out of Latin America's strong research universities and offers a relocation package worth roughly $100,000 per company. That covers the unglamorous, deal-killing stuff: visas, office space, housing.

Here is the part that surprises people. Atento takes no equity in exchange for that package. It is an incentive, not an investment term. The logic is that the money removes the single biggest barrier to relocation - the founder's personal risk - and lets the firm decide, separately and on the merits, whether to actually invest. Philanthropic dollars de-risk the move; venture dollars follow the ones worth backing.

I would think of it more as a model for using philanthropic incentives to facilitate the investment of venture capital. Michael Basch, founder

Across two cohorts the program has supported 22 startups and 40 founders, and pulled 45 venture investors to its demo days - the kind of signal that tells a founder in Bogota that a Tulsa address won't leave them stranded. Of the first cohort's eleven companies, eight indicated they intended to open or relocate to a Tulsa office. The second cohort added names like Monte Caldera, a Mexican materials startup, and Migma, an Argentine biotech working on antioxidants.

04The ecosystem is the portfolio

A relocation program only works if there is somewhere worth relocating to. That is why Atento's investments are only half the story; the other half is the city itself. The firm's leadership has been tied to a run of Tulsa initiatives that built the scaffolding around the deals - Tulsa Remote, which paid thousands of remote workers to move to Oklahoma; Build in Tulsa, aimed at Black founders; Atlas School, a software-engineering program feeding the local talent pipeline; plus Campus Tulsa, 412 Angels, and Tulsa Innovation Labs.

Put those pieces next to each other and a flywheel appears. Remote workers thicken the talent pool. A coding school trains engineers. Relocation grants import founders. A fund-of-funds imports investors. Direct checks catch the best companies that result. Each program makes the next one cheaper to run.

05What's in the portfolio

The bets track the thesis. In health, Atento backed PatchRx, a remote therapeutic-management platform that helps patients take medication on time, and RobbieAI, which uses computer vision to prevent patient falls and injuries. The Latin American cohorts skew toward materials and biotech. It is a portfolio built less around a single sector than around a type of company: technically deep, often unglamorous, frequently founded by someone the coasts weren't calling.

As someone that likes to believe that America still wants the best talent on Earth... Michael Basch, on recruiting immigrant founders

06The barista who ran the fund

The person who assembled all of this, Michael Basch, did not arrive by the usual route. His career started behind a coffee counter in high school; he rose to oversee operations across 22 stores and a roughly $19 million coffee business. He later helped build a mobile-advertising company, worked on technology and innovation policy for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, and collected an MBA from USC and a master's from Harvard's Kennedy School along the way.

He moved to Tulsa in 2018, partnered with the Kaiser foundation, and spent roughly eight years building Atento into a team of about 30. In 2026 he moved on to Renaissance Philanthropy as a director focused on fund strategy and regional innovation - a transition that leaves the firm's core idea, and its portfolio, in place.

07Where it fits

Atento sits at an intersection few firms occupy: part seed fund, part economic-development engine, part immigration on-ramp. Its nearest cousins are the place-based and heartland-focused investors - Drive Capital in Columbus, Steve Case's Rise of the Rest - and mission-driven regional funds. What sets Atento apart is the source of its capital. Where those firms raise from many LPs and answer mainly to returns, Atento draws from one foundation and answers to two goals at once, which is exactly what lets it spend $100,000 on a founder's move and ask for nothing back.

The open question is the one every place-based fund eventually faces: can financial returns and job-creation goals genuinely live in the same fund, over a full cycle, without one quietly crowding out the other? Atento has spent more than half a billion dollars arguing that they can. The next few years, and the founders who stay in Tulsa, will grade the answer.