Human Ventures has a disarmingly broad investment thesis. People want to feel better. They need to earn, save and spend money. They look for company, diversion, useful information and some control over their attention. Behind each plain sentence is a market, and behind those markets is the New York venture firm’s favorite raw material: a founder who sees an unmet need before it becomes an obvious category.
The firm calls this the Human Needs Economy. Its portfolio makes the phrase less misty. Current offers consumer banking. Tia provides women’s health care. Evvy develops precision vaginal health care. Tiny Organics delivers food for young children. Capsule builds video-editing software for content teams. Adelaide measures attention in advertising. These companies do not share a standard venture-capital sector. They share a claim on something people repeatedly care about.
That is the first useful thing to understand about Human Ventures: the firm is not selling founders a theory about human kindness. It is using enduring needs as a filter for demand. Health, livelihood, connection and attention survive changes in software fashion. The products that serve them can change quickly.
A studio before it was a fund
Heather Hartnett and Joe Marchese founded Human Ventures in 2015. The name began as a private signal. If one introduced a “good Human” to the other, Marchese later recalled, the introduction deserved a meeting. They turned that social instinct into a company-building platform, with Hartnett as chief executive and Marchese as executive chairman.
The first version looked more like a workshop than a capital allocator. Human Ventures found people early, helped test ideas, assembled teams and put operational foundations under young companies. Its investment arm co-led the Series A for restaurant platform Reserve, which Resy later acquired. By 2019, the studio had backed 22 founders whose companies were valued collectively at $150 million, according to Fast Company. That year it introduced a debut $50 million fund to invest both inside and outside the studio and to support later rounds.
“We bring in founders early and build teams around them. We help be their cofounder, essentially, in the beginning.”Heather Hartnett, Fast Company, 2019
This structure sits between familiar models. A conventional seed fund chooses from companies already in motion. An accelerator runs a standardized batch, usually for equity. A venture studio originates or shapes companies and can become deeply involved in their creation. Human Ventures borrows from all three, then adds a persistent founder and adviser community. That mixture is its product as much as its checks are.
The long audition at the edge of an idea
For a founder, the firm’s most distinctive door is Humans in the Wild, a 100-day incubation program for people still developing an idea. Participants keep their equity. They build beside a selected cohort, receive weekly one-to-one strategic help, meet guest experts and tap the wider Human Ventures network. At the end, the company may be ready for a pre-seed institutional round, including a possible Human Ventures investment. Taking that investment is not compulsory.
Find the need
Start with a founder and a stubborn human problem.
Test demand
Interview customers, build an MVP and challenge assumptions.
Build in company
Use a cohort, co-pilot and experts as early scaffolding.
Raise, or do not
Prepare for pre-seed capital without a required Human check.
The arrangement is clever because it solves two problems at once. Founders get concentrated help during the loneliest, least legible stretch of company creation. Human Ventures gets months of observation before making an investment decision. A pitch meeting reveals how a founder tells a story. A 100-day build reveals how that person learns, recruits, responds to bad evidence and treats collaborators.
The service continues beyond incubation. The firm describes support with product development, market validation, hiring, operations and fundraising. Alumni and portfolio founders become peers rather than names on a directory. In 2024, Evvy co-founder Priyanka Jain told Fortune that she felt “like a human, not just a founder or a number.” Groundswell founder Jake Wood offered the more commercial version: many funds advertise networks, but Human activates its own.
There is a practical reason this matters. At pre-seed, a company has little data and fewer specialists. The founder may be the salesperson, recruiter, product manager and customer-support desk before lunch. An introduction to the right clinician, designer, first employee or prospective customer can change what gets built next week. Human Ventures is selling compression: fewer cold starts, faster feedback and a shorter route to the person who has seen a similar problem.
It also treats the founder’s emotional load as operational reality. Company formation is full of days when the available evidence is thin and every decision feels permanent. Cohorts give solo founders a temporary bench; recurring contact makes it easier to surface trouble before a board meeting. This does not make company building gentle. It makes uncertainty discussable, which is often the first step toward making it manageable.
Portfolio logicFour markets wearing ordinary clothes
Human Ventures organizes its public portfolio into four territories: health and wellness; future of work and money; experience and connection; and media and attention. The boundaries are intentionally porous. TheSkimm, acquired by Ziff Davis’ Everyday Health Group in 2025, sits where information, women’s lives and health media overlap. Current mixes consumer software and financial services. Tia and Evvy turn gaps in women’s care into clinical and data businesses.
Bars visualize the breadth of the stated thesis, not company count, capital deployed or performance.
The customers are therefore two-sided. Founders use Human Ventures for capital, judgment and access. Limited partners use the firm to reach very early private companies. Human Ventures earns its keep like a venture manager: it deploys LP capital into equity positions and aims to return gains when those positions appreciate or exit. The precise fees, carry and studio ownership terms are private.
The portfolio companies, in turn, sell to a much wider public. Some are direct-to-consumer subscriptions or services; others sell software and infrastructure to employers, marketers or operators. Tia’s patients, Current’s banking customers and Capsule’s creative teams share no buyer profile. Human Ventures is upstream of all of them. It helps founders convert a recognized need into a company, then depends on those companies to find repeatable distribution and sound unit economics.
By April 2024, Fortune reported more than 60 portfolio companies and three unicorns. Fund II was approaching $50 million, with Nuveen affiliate Churchill Asset Management as an anchor limited partner and Bank of America also investing. That mattered in a period when emerging managers struggled to raise second funds. It suggested that the studio record could travel into a more institutional product.
The competition is abundant capital.
Founders can choose New York seed firms, national funds, accelerators or studios. Human Ventures competes by meeting them earlier and making operating involvement, not fund size, the center of the offer.
What the spreadsheet cannot hold
Human Ventures competes with New York investors such as Primary Venture Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Eniac and FirstMark, plus builders and accelerators including Betaworks, AlleyCorp, Antler, Techstars and Y Combinator. Most can provide credible capital and introductions. The difference is one of sequence and intensity: Human Ventures wants to encounter a founder while the company is still becoming coherent, then use studio work as both assistance and diligence.
Its geography reinforces that approach. New York supplies dense expertise in finance, advertising, media, health, retail and hospitality. Human Ventures treats technology not as a separate local industry but as a tool moving through those established ones. A founder who has spent years inside a broken system may be more valuable to the firm than a tidy pitch aimed at a fashionable category.
Culture functions as a sourcing mechanism here. A firm known for active introductions and a diverse founder room is more likely to receive referrals from people who do not resemble the standard repeat founder. Human Ventures has publicly described looking beyond that archetype to the “PhD in life” and the “person behind the person” - operators whose experience is deep but whose founder identity is new. Its participation in All Raise programming and NYCBlend, a collaboration among New York venture firms, extended that search beyond its own office.
The risk is the inverse of the advantage. “Human needs” can explain almost any consumer-facing investment after the fact. Hands-on support is expensive and difficult to scale. Networks are only useful when members continue answering. A small firm must choose where intimacy produces better returns and where it becomes overhead. Human Ventures’ exits - including Reserve, Clark, Girlboss, The Muse, Toucan and theSkimm - provide evidence of motion, not a public measure of overall fund performance.
Still, the model contains a lesson founders and investors can steal. Look for needs before categories. Replace a short audition with shared work. Design a community around specific acts - hiring, customer introductions, emotional support, follow-on capital - rather than membership itself. Make the investment thesis useful even on a day when no investment is made.
A decade after a “good Human” meant someone worth meeting, Human Ventures has turned that instinct into an institution with funds, programs and a broad portfolio. Its wager is neither sentimental nor especially futuristic. People remain complicated, needy and social. Those characteristics have been producing businesses for a very long time.