Most venture capitalists share a quiet superstition: that the best startups tend to appear within driving distance of the people already funding startups. It is a tidy theory, and it keeps a lot of investors comfortably close to home in a few zip codes on two coasts. DeepWork Capital, an early-stage firm headquartered in downtown Orlando, has spent a decade arguing the opposite - that "underserved by venture capital" is often just another way of saying "mispriced," and that the first check into an overlooked founder can be the most valuable one on the cap table.
Founded in 2015 as the FAN Fund and later rebranded, DeepWork Capital invests in technology and life-sciences companies at the seed and Series A stages, with a stated preference for Florida and the surrounding regions that national funds tend to fly over rather than land in. The pitch is compact enough to fit on a business card - "Capital. Guidance. Focus." - but the middle word is the one the partners take literally.
01 / The thesisWhat the firm actually does
DeepWork Capital is a closed-end venture fund. It raises committed money from limited partners and deploys it into equity stakes in young companies, aiming to return capital when those companies are acquired or go public. On paper that describes hundreds of firms. What sets DeepWork apart is where it points the money and how early it is willing to point it.
The firm describes itself as "comfortable being the first institutional capital in a company" - the round that comes right after friends, family and angel investors, when there is often more conviction than revenue. Checks generally run between $1 million and $5 million, and DeepWork prefers to lead or co-lead, which means taking a board seat and staying close. It calls itself "cross-disciplinary," and the portfolio backs up the phrase: life sciences on one end, space technology and B2B SaaS on the other.
That willingness to go first is more unusual than it sounds. Being the first institutional investor means underwriting a company before there is a comfortable pile of metrics to hide behind, which is why so many funds wait for someone else to price the round. DeepWork's stated screen leans on the founders themselves - the firm talks openly about looking for grit, integrity and market understanding, the qualities that are hard to fake and harder to spreadsheet. It is an old-fashioned way to pick investments, and in a market where the earliest checks are often the most contested, it doubles as a filter for the kind of company the firm wants to spend years alongside.
02 / The customersWho it is really for
DeepWork has two sets of customers, and they sit on opposite sides of the table. The first is founders - early-stage teams in technology and life sciences who need money and a knowledgeable partner before the larger coastal funds will return a call. The second is the limited partners who put capital into the fund and expect it to find returns in places others are not looking.
The founder relationship is where the firm spends its energy. The partners are former operators - people who have built, run and sold companies - and they position that history as the product. The promise is not just money but board-level help with strategy, hiring, financing and the unglamorous operational problems that decide whether a seed-stage company survives its second year.
03 / The problemGeography as a funding filter
Venture capital has a distribution problem, and it is not subtle. A large majority of U.S. venture dollars land in a handful of metros, which leaves capable founders elsewhere raising money on hard mode. For a company in Tampa, Gainesville or Jacksonville, the issue is rarely the quality of the idea - it is that the nearest institutional check is a plane ride and a warm introduction away.
DeepWork treats that gap as its opening. By being local, present and early, it can own a meaningful stake in companies that would otherwise struggle to get a first term sheet at all. The bet is that concentration and hands-on work in a thin market beats the spray-and-pray approach that plays out where capital is abundant and competition for deals is fierce.
04 / The differenceDeep work, not a spreadsheet
The name is the argument. "Deep work" borrows the idea that meaningful output - whether you are building a company or backing one - comes from concentrated, undistracted effort rather than volume. Applied to venture, it points toward a smaller number of high-conviction bets and real involvement in each, instead of a sprawling logo wall the partners could never actually help.
That is a genuine differentiator in a category that has drifted toward speed and scale. Many seed funds now run on rapid, lightly diligenced checks and hope one bet carries the fund. DeepWork's model asks its partners to earn their equity through work after the wire clears. It is slower and it does not scale infinitely, which is precisely the point.
05 / The rangeFrom cushions to gene therapy
Read the portfolio and the cross-disciplinary label stops sounding like marketing. DeepWork has backed Kalogon, maker of a smart seating cushion designed to prevent pressure injuries; IRYS InsurTech and Homee, both modernizing how the insurance industry runs; Worth AI and Tenex Security in AI-driven risk and cybersecurity; Home Lending Pal in housing access; and life-sciences names such as Genascence in gene therapy and Astrocyte Pharmaceuticals in brain-injury treatment. X-Lumin is working on laser-based wireless communication; HypGames makes mobile games.
The breadth is deliberate. In a thin market, a fund that insists on a single narrow category may simply run out of qualified companies to back. By staying cross-disciplinary, DeepWork can follow talent and traction wherever they surface in its region rather than forcing every deal through one thesis.
Approximate portfolio mix by theme, illustrative.
06 / The receiptsExits outside the Valley
The strategy has produced outcomes. DeepWork's realized exits include Stax (formerly FattMerchant) in payments, PikMyKid (acquired by CENTEGIX) in school safety, RepScrubs (acquired by THL Partners) in hospital apparel, Intelligent Observation (acquired by HID Global) in hospital hygiene compliance, and AbFero Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Pharmacosmos) in therapeutics. Portfolio company HCW Biologics reached the public markets on Nasdaq. These are not headline-grabbing megadeals, but they are the kind of steady, real exits that a regional fund needs to prove its map.
Exits matter for a reason beyond the returns they generate. Every acquisition or public listing sends money and experienced people back into the local ecosystem, where some of them become the next founders and angels. A fund that keeps producing them in a single region is not just harvesting companies; it is slowly thickening the market it invests in - which, over enough years, chips away at the very scarcity that made the market attractive in the first place. It is a strange kind of success, one that partly competes with its own thesis, and it may be the clearest sign that the strategy is working.
07 / The operatorsWho runs it
DeepWork was founded by three managing partners - Mitchel Laskey, Ben Patz and Kathy Chiu - supported by a small team of venture partners and associates. The partners run the funds day to day: developing theses, sourcing and screening deals, running diligence and sitting on boards. Their pitch to founders leans on having done the job themselves.
Laskey's resume is a case in point. Before investing full time he co-founded and led Dynamic Healthcare Technologies, a healthcare-IT company that traded publicly and later merged with Cerner; co-founded CNL Bank; and chaired a public company. He has testified before Congress on Homeland Security matters and has been recognized as TiEcon's Angel Investor of the Year. That operator-to-investor arc is the template the firm sells - people who have sat in the founder's chair and know where it pinches.
08 / The marketWhere DeepWork fits
DeepWork sits in a growing tier of regional venture firms trying to prove that returns do not require a Bay Area zip code. In Florida it shares the field with names like Florida Funders, Fuel Venture Capital and Las Olas Venture Capital, and it competes for the best local deals with national seed funds that occasionally reach into the state. Its edge is not check size - larger funds can outspend it - but presence, patience and a willingness to be early where others are late.
If the long-running shift of talent and company formation away from a few coastal hubs continues, funds like DeepWork are positioned to benefit. The firm has spent a decade building the relationships, the local reputation and the exit track record that a first mover in an overlooked market needs. Whether that becomes a durable advantage or gets competed away as capital follows the talent is the open question - and, conveniently, the reason the story is worth watching.
For now, DeepWork Capital keeps doing the unglamorous thing: writing early checks in places the flight map ignores, then staying in the room long after the money lands. It is a slower way to run a venture firm. It may also be a smarter one.