Most venture firms play a numbers game. They spread capital across dozens of companies, accept that the majority will fizzle, and pray one becomes a rocket. March Capital, a firm tucked into Santa Monica a few blocks from the beach, decided early on to play a different game entirely. It writes a small number of checks, waits until a company has already proven customers want what it sells, and then concentrates - backing its best names again and again. The clearest proof that the approach works arrived in 2017, when the firm put roughly $26.5 million into a then-little-known cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. That stake reportedly turned into a billion-dollar return.
Founded in 2014 by Jim Armstrong, Sumant Mandal, Gregory Milken and Jamie Montgomery, March Capital now manages more than $1.6 billion across four funds. It sits at the intersection of two things Los Angeles is not usually famous for - patient institutional capital and deep enterprise-software expertise - and has quietly become one of the sharpest AI-era investors on the West Coast.
01 / The ThesisFewer bets, held longer
March Capital describes itself plainly: it invests in frontier technology companies at the leading edge of the AI shift. In practice that means the mission-critical software and infrastructure that large enterprises run on - cybersecurity, fintech, data and cloud infrastructure, and the growing layer of AI applications sitting on top of them. The firm invests mostly at the early-growth stage, the moment after a startup has found product-market fit but before it has scaled, when the risk is less about whether the product works and more about how fast it can grow.
Its operating rules read like a value investor's checklist more than a typical venture pitch: partner with entrepreneurs who can scale, target large markets with proven demand, seek quick time-to-value and genuine platform potential, keep valuation discipline with a margin of safety, and build concentrated portfolios that double down on the winners. The firm aims for roughly 12 to 15 new investments per fund - a deliberately small number in a business that often rewards volume.
02 / The Signature WinThe CrowdStrike bet
Every firm has a story it tells to explain its philosophy, and for March Capital that story is CrowdStrike. In 2017 the firm led into the security company's Series D round with about $26.5 million. CrowdStrike went public in 2019 and became one of the defining cybersecurity platforms of the cloud era. The return, reported in the tens-to-one range, put March Capital on the map and validated the thing it had been arguing all along: that concentration, not diversification, is where outsized venture returns actually come from.
Security has stayed a throughline. Beyond CrowdStrike, the portfolio has included Expel, SpyCloud, Forter, Xage and Tessian - the last acquired by Proofpoint - alongside KnowBe4, which was taken private by Vista Equity Partners. It is a book built by people who understood, early, that every company becoming a software company also meant every company becoming a target.
03 / The MoneyFrom $240M to $650M
March Capital has raised steadily larger funds without abandoning its small-portfolio discipline. The inaugural fund launched in 2016 at $240 million. A second fund of roughly $300 million followed in 2019, with the firm going long on Los Angeles, India, AI and technology infrastructure. Fund III closed at $450 million in 2020. And in February 2023, March closed Fund IV at $650 million, aimed squarely at what the partners call AI-powered intelligent business applications.
The business model underneath is the standard venture structure, applied with unusual restraint. March raises capital from limited partners - institutions, endowments and family offices - deploys it into a concentrated set of companies, and earns management fees plus a share of the profits, or carried interest, when those companies exit through an IPO, an acquisition or a secondary sale. The firm's real product is judgment, and its scorecard is the roughly 100-plus investments it has made, producing 12 unicorns, 7 IPOs and 35 acquisitions.
04 / The PortfolioSecurity, fintech, and a little biology
March Capital's holdings span more than you would expect from a firm this focused. On the enterprise side sit CrowdStrike, ThoughtSpot's agentic analytics, Uniphore's business-AI platform, Acceldata's data management, Immuta's data governance and Together AI's open-source AI infrastructure. In fintech and commerce, the book runs from Forter's fraud protection and EarnIn's earned-wage access to Extend, Gr4vy and a cluster of Indian infrastructure bets - BillDesk, Shiprocket, CarTrade and Vayana Network.
Then there is the part that surprises people: generative biology. March has backed Generate:Biomedicines, Lila Sciences and Tessera Therapeutics, wagering that the same AI methods reshaping software will reshape drug discovery and gene writing. Design tool Canva and legal-AI platform Luminance round out a portfolio that is less a theme than a conviction - back the companies building the picks and shovels of the AI economy, wherever that economy shows up.
05 / The GatheringTwo decades of the Montgomery Summit
March Capital's most visible fixture is not a deal but an event. The Montgomery Summit, launched by Jamie Montgomery in 2004 - a full decade before the firm itself existed - brings more than 1,200 entrepreneurs, investors and corporate executives to Santa Monica each spring. The 2025 edition ran on March 4 and 5 at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel. For a firm that keeps a small portfolio, the Summit is an outsized asset: a standing network of founders, operators and capital that feeds deal flow, diligence and hiring long after the panels end.
06 / The PositionWhere March fits in the market
March Capital plays in a crowded field of AI-and-enterprise growth investors - Battery Ventures, Insight Partners, Coatue, Bessemer, ICONIQ Growth and Lightspeed among them, plus fellow Angeleno firm Upfront Ventures. What separates March is less its targets than its posture: a smaller portfolio, an explicit margin-of-safety on price that reads more like private equity than venture, and a willingness to sit inside a company through several rounds rather than chase the next new logo. In a decade defined by ever-larger funds spreading ever-thinner, March made the opposite wager and let compounding carry the weight.
The last year suggests the thesis is still in motion. In January 2025 the firm led SuperOps' $25 million Series C for AI-powered IT management, alongside Addition and Z47. A month later it announced an investment in Together AI, backing the infrastructure layer that open-source AI models increasingly run on. The names change; the pattern does not - find the mission-critical layer, buy it at a defensible price, and hold.