The Recovering Founder
Who Bets on the Frontier
There is a specific kind of VC that founders trust immediately - the kind who has felt the particular dread of a missed payroll, the peculiar joy of a first paying customer, the slow burn of a pivot that might not work. Morgan Schwanke is that kind. He calls himself a "recovering founder" on his social profiles, and the self-deprecation is the point. It signals something real: he has been on the other side of the table.
His origin story starts in a freshman dorm at the University of San Diego. Housing was expensive, information was fragmented, and students were getting overcharged by landlords who knew they had an information advantage. Morgan's solution was a spreadsheet - a shared Google doc tracking properties, prices, and landlord reputations. Friends asked for access. More friends asked. And then the question that changes things: why not build this properly?
What became OnMyBlock raised $6.3 million and expanded to multiple California markets. It ran on the logic that local market intelligence, distributed and organized, could level the power dynamic between students and landlords. It was an early glimpse into how Morgan thinks: find where information is broken, and fix it.
"Technologies that redefine industries. Founders that shape the future."- Mana Ventures Mission
The pivot to investing was not a retreat from building - it was an extension of it. After OnMyBlock, Morgan moved through Restream (heading business development for the livestreaming platform) and Unity Technologies (a product role that let him watch a $12 billion IPO happen from the inside). Each stop added a lens: distribution mechanics, platform dynamics, the long arc of how a gaming engine becomes infrastructure for industries it never anticipated.
He founded Mana Ventures in 2016 and has been running the same play since: write early checks - typically $100K to $1 million - into companies operating where most investors aren't yet looking. The sectors rotate as technology evolves, but the thesis is stable. Back the founders reshaping categories before the categories exist.
What Mana Ventures Actually Does
Twenty-seven people. Nine partners. Over $50 million deployed. By the numbers, Mana Ventures is a small fund. By the portfolio, it is something else entirely.
The firm operates across five primary sectors: AI and compute infrastructure, software and SaaS, robotics and autonomy, space technology, and healthcare. The investment stage runs from seed through Series C, with the sweet spot at seed and Series A - early enough to have conviction without a consensus, late enough to see a product functioning in the world.
The current portfolio includes names that have become shorthand for entire categories. Groq built the inference chip that changed the speed conversation in AI. Lambda Labs became default infrastructure for AI researchers who needed GPU access before anyone was organizing a market for it. Skydio made drones that navigate autonomously. Figure AI is building humanoid robots - currently valued at $39 billion after raising over $1 billion in committed capital. Each of these was a Mana Ventures bet made before the outcome was obvious.
The 2025-2026 numbers are particularly striking. Mana Ventures delivered $27 million in total DPI to its LPs throughout 2025 - and then $45 million more in just the first quarter of 2026. TensorStax, a portfolio company, was acquired by Snowflake. K2 Space - another portfolio company - raised a $110 million Series B to mass-produce multi-orbit satellite platforms. These are not paper returns. The portfolio is materializing.
A Map of the Frontier
Selected companies from across the Mana Ventures portfolio - each representing a bet on technology before it was obvious.
The Collective: When Your Cap Table Has a Superpower
Most venture funds offer money and a monthly board call. Mana Ventures built something different: The Collective, a curated partner network of founders, executives, and operators who provide active, hands-on support to portfolio companies. The kind of network that can open a door at Google, find an executive recruiter, or run through a GTM strategy with someone who has done it before.
The names on this list are not advisory board decoration. They are working partners - people like Arash Ferdowsi (who co-founded Dropbox), Matt Mullenweg (who built WordPress), Paul English (who built Kayak), Philip Inghelbrecht (who co-founded Shazam), and Michael Antonov (who co-founded Oculus). Rick Osterloh, formerly SVP of Hardware at Google. Deborah Liu, CEO of Ancestry. These are people who have built category-defining companies and are now helping the next generation do the same.
Where Mana Ventures Writes Checks
The fund operates across five primary verticals - technologies where the fundamental rules of an industry are being rewritten by better compute, better materials, or better data.
From a Spreadsheet to Space Satellites
The through-line in Morgan's career is not a sector or a technology - it is a pattern of finding where markets have information problems and backing the people solving them. OnMyBlock was a housing information market. Restream was a distribution information market. Unity was a tooling problem - how do you build interactive 3D experiences without rebuilding the engine each time?
At Mana Ventures, the same pattern plays out at the frontier. Who has information advantages in the AI compute market? Who understands the physics and economics of low-cost satellite platforms? Who has the biological data and the AI infrastructure to change how drugs are discovered? These are the questions the fund bets on.
The "recovering founder" framing is more than self-deprecation. It signals a specific kind of investor empathy - someone who sat across the table from VCs who didn't get it, who built something through the valley of death between idea and product-market fit, who knows what a founder needs at 11pm on a Tuesday when the data isn't moving the right direction. That experience shapes how Mana Ventures operates: hands-on, network-connected, opinionated about what actually matters.
"Founder / GP @Mana_Ventures | Investor in 200+ co's | Recovering founder."- Morgan Schwanke, Twitter/X bio
Morgan studied Interdisciplinary Humanities at USD - a degree that might seem improbable for a deep tech investor, but makes a certain sense in retrospect. The ability to synthesize across disciplines, to understand cultural context alongside technical merit, to communicate across the gap between what engineers build and what markets want - these are humanities skills applied at a venture scale. Before he could address the graduating class, he had to overcome shyness by taking a public speaking class. The discipline transferred.
Nine years into building Mana Ventures, the returns are real and the portfolio companies are in the news. Neros Technologies - the U.S.'s largest drone manufacturer by unit volume - grew from 16 employees to over 140 in a single year. Figure AI is being discussed as one of the defining technology companies of the decade. TensorStax was acquired by Snowflake. The exits are converting from paper to cash, and the cash is going back to LPs at a pace that is accelerating, not slowing.
The fund with 27 people and $50 million deployed is producing outcomes that larger funds with ten times the resources are watching closely. That is the specific ambition Morgan Schwanke has been building toward since he closed a dorm room spreadsheet and started thinking about what comes next.
From USD to the Frontier
Where to Find Morgan Schwanke
Morgan is active on Twitter/X and LinkedIn. Mana Ventures publishes portfolio updates, newsroom coverage, and investment theses at their website. The Collective partner network and full portfolio are listed on the Mana Ventures site.