In venture capital, location is usually shorthand for access. Sand Hill Road means partners, founders and money moving through the same few miles of Northern California. Fuel Venture Capital chose a different shorthand. It opened in Miami in 2017, when the city's technology identity was still more aspiration than accepted fact, and used Coconut Grove as a junction for South Florida wealth, Latin American founders and a wider global network. The result is not a regional fund in the usual sense. It is a Miami-based distribution and sourcing machine whose portfolio runs from a Nordic challenger bank to a Brazilian payments platform, a New York meal marketplace and an artificial-intelligence coding company.
The firm has two customers, and its story makes little sense unless both stay in the frame. On one side are founders who need capital, boards, introductions and help surviving the awkward distance between product-market fit and scale. On the other are ultra-high-net-worth individuals, family offices and institutions seeking a route into private technology. Fuel's job is to make those two groups legible to each other.
That sounds simple. It is not. Private companies disclose less than public ones, trade infrequently and can take years to produce cash. Founders, meanwhile, often view investor demands as a tax on speed. Fuel's pitch is that a team steeped in wealth management, hedge funds and operating experience can translate between the two worlds without sanding away what makes a startup valuable.
The product is access, packaged with judgment
Fuel does not sell software or subscriptions. It raises investment vehicles, buys equity or equity-linked stakes in private technology companies and works to return more capital than it collected. Management fees support the staff and the long holding period; a share of investment gains, commonly called carried interest, aligns the manager with successful exits. Fuel does not publish its exact fee terms, so the interesting part is the architecture around that familiar model.
Its first flagship fund is listed at $162 million and 33 portfolio companies. An open-ended Opportunity Pool, listed at $143 million, lets eligible investors concentrate more money in selected companies already sourced through Fuel. A $100 million FinTech Growth Fund assembled five later-stage financial-technology names from the portfolio. A second flagship entity appeared in a 2023 securities filing. By 2025, Fuel said it managed about $550 million across five funds and had deployed capital into more than 40 early-stage companies.
The co-investment option is especially revealing. Traditional venture funds diversify by design, while limited partners sometimes want extra exposure to a company they understand or a deal that has earned conviction. Fuel's pool creates a second decision point: first trust the manager to source broadly, then choose whether to lean further into a particular opportunity. Concentration can improve outcomes when the judgment is right and magnify losses when it is wrong. Access is useful; access with a risk label is more useful.
“My job is to help them turn vision into velocity.”Maggie Vo, Managing General Partner and CIO
A portfolio organized around a day in the life
Fuel describes itself as industry agnostic, but that phrase can hide more than it explains. Its portfolio becomes clearer when arranged around four verbs: transact, consume, work and enjoy. Curve combines payment cards in one wallet. RecargaPay brings payments and mobile money to Brazilian consumers and small businesses. NovoPayment supplies banking infrastructure through APIs. Those companies live under “transact,” even though one is a consumer card, another a wallet and the third enterprise plumbing.
Under “consume,” CookUnity connects chefs directly with subscribers who want prepared meals. Under “work,” Tradeshift digitizes procurement, invoicing and B2B payments, while Replit turns software creation into a browser-based, increasingly AI-assisted activity. Under “enjoy,” Betr shrinks sports wagering to moments inside a game, and AEXLAB builds social virtual-reality experiences. The categories are broad, but the shared question is concrete: can technology remove friction from a repeated behavior and build a defensible business while doing it?
The checkbook has appeared at meaningful moments. Fuel led CookUnity's $15.5 million Series A in 2021, before the meal company raised a $47 million Series B. It co-led RecargaPay's $70 million Series C, Curve's $95 million Series C, NovoPayment's $19 million Series A and Taxfyle's $20 million Series B. In 2023, it doubled its disclosed investment in Betr from $10 million to $20 million during the sports platform's Series A2. These are not all seed bets. Fuel will enter early, but it also follows traction into growth rounds.
Phased conviction, not a crystal ball
Fuel calls its method a phased investment thesis. The plain-English version is familiar to disciplined investors: make selective initial commitments, watch operating evidence accumulate, and reserve the ability to invest more in companies that keep proving the case. Maggie Vo's background helps explain the emphasis. Before joining Fuel in 2018, she worked in public markets and managed a global long-short equity strategy. Her version of venture investing carries the habits of downside analysis, comparative valuation and portfolio construction into a field better known for power-law upside.
Numbers do not eliminate founder judgment. Vo and operating partner Olivia Gaudree have said they look for resilience, the ability to attract talent and a pursuit of truth - founders capable of hearing criticism, changing their minds and still making a decision. Early revenue can disappear. Products get rebuilt. Markets shift. At the beginning, the team's learning rate is often the most durable asset available to underwrite.
Fuel's “founder focused, investor driven” line captures a real tension rather than resolving it. A friendly investor may indulge a founder too long. A manager fixated on quarterly reassurance may push a young company toward the wrong milestone. Fuel's claim is that alignment comes from active boards, direct communication and a shared plan for follow-on capital. The proof, as in every private fund, arrives slowly and unevenly through financings, exits and write-offs.
Miami is an edge, not a fence
Jeff Ransdell spent two decades at Merrill Lynch before leaving the giant desk and layered organization of a bank for face-to-face work with founders. That history gave Fuel a ready vocabulary for private clients: allocation, liquidity, risk, reporting and diversification. Miami added proximity to Latin America and a culture comfortable with money crossing borders. In 2020, a partnership with IDC Ventures broadened the portfolio and produced repeated co-investments across the United States, Europe and Latin America.
The geography also gave Fuel a useful outsider story. When every venture firm hunts in the same founder networks, consensus forms quickly and prices follow. Looking elsewhere is not charity; it is an attempt to find comparable ambition with less competition. Fuel reports founders from 32 countries and more than 130 family-office, ultra-high-net-worth and institutional LP relationships. Its headquarters is local. Its market is not.
Nor is the firm doctrinaire about staying away from California. In October 2025, Fuel appointed founder and investor Selene Casabal as general partner and chief venture officer, established a San Francisco presence and said she would lead more than $100 million of investment into AI companies. Casabal's operating history and scout network add a Silicon Valley feed to the firm's Miami base. The move is best understood as bicoastal sourcing: keep the different vantage point, but do not confuse independence with absence.
A location can be an investment filter without becoming an investment limit.
Where Fuel fits now
Fuel competes in a crowded middle. Local firms can promise deeper Florida networks. Silicon Valley franchises can offer denser technical circles and larger follow-on reserves. Fintech specialists can bring sharper regulatory expertise, while secondary platforms can give investors direct access to recognizable pre-IPO names. Fuel's answer is a bundle: global sourcing, Miami and Latin America adjacency, public-market underwriting, multi-stage capital, co-investment and hands-on support.
Its latest distribution effort pushes that bundle toward registered investment advisers. In 2026, Ransdell began discussing the Cap-U Fuel Innovation 100 Fund, a strategy presented as diversified exposure to roughly 100 late-stage private technology companies through employee stock-option financing transactions. The premise speaks to a market change: companies stay private longer, so more value can accrue before ordinary public-market investors ever see a ticker. Wealth advisers want an on-ramp, but they also need diversification, reporting and a structure they can explain to clients.
For founders, Fuel is most useful when the company has real traction, international potential and a reason to value the firm's private-wealth and operating networks. For investors, it offers a manager-led route into an illiquid asset class that is difficult to source deal by deal. Neither group gets certainty. Founders still face dilution and board scrutiny; investors still face long lockups and the possibility of total loss. What Fuel sells is informed participation.
That may be the firm's most accurate place in the market. It is not trying to make venture capital feel safe. It is trying to make it navigable - with Miami as the bridge, staged conviction as the traffic rule and a portfolio broad enough to catch the ways software keeps entering ordinary life.
Follow the trail
Fuel publishes its thesis, team and portfolio on its own site. Its social feeds carry current appointments and portfolio updates, while recent interviews explain the firm's move toward the private-wealth channel.