The first obstacle was cash. In March 2020, Allen Smith and colleagues connected to LinkedIn and Microsoft’s Black Inclusion Group were discussing how to support Black founders. Raising money from that community proved harder. Believing in the idea did not mean having spare cash.
Smith’s own wealth offered a clue: Microsoft stock. He began exploring stock-based participation rather than assuming everyone could write a check. “Cash wasn’t going to do it,” he told VC Include. The episode reveals the practical question underneath Musa Capital: how do you turn the assets people actually possess into participation?
- The investment: pre-seed and seed companies building vertical AI and enterprise software.
- The contribution: capital alongside product, engineering, hiring, and sales experience.
- The entry points: founder introductions, operator participation, technical classes, and startup projects.
“Cash wasn’t going to do it.”
Allen Smith, speaking to VC Include
The person behind the introduction
Musa’s original insight extended beyond stock. A technology employee may know which founder understands a customer’s problem, which product is technically plausible, and which buyer might answer a call. Smith has described sharing carried-interest economics with scouts who source investments. That gives the person making a useful introduction a stake in its eventual outcome.
His professional history explains the emphasis on execution. Before Musa, Smith worked on Microsoft Relationship Sales, the commercial pairing of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Microsoft’s CRM software. Bringing two products together requires more than a working integration. Someone must explain the proposition, organize the selling, and help customers understand why their existing routine should change.
Today, Musa’s operator network recruits people with experience in AI, cloud infrastructure, security, engineering leadership, and B2B selling. Its proposed contributions are specific: product guidance, hiring support, technical advice, positioning feedback, and introductions. The useful question for a founder is who can help with the decision currently blocking the business.
AI has to get through Tuesday
Musa’s current investment thesis concentrates on vertical AI and enterprise SaaS. Vertical AI means software designed around a particular industry or task. Healthcare infrastructure, fintech infrastructure, developer tools, and operational software all appear in its stated areas of interest. The connective tissue is work that a business needs done repeatedly.
Its selection criteria make that preference tangible. Musa looks for workflow ownership, an AI advantage that improves performance, enterprise readiness, recurring software potential, and founders who understand their customers. Reliability, security, and governance belong in the conversation alongside speed and accuracy. A product must survive the conditions under which its customer actually operates.
That gives founders a useful way to prepare. Describe the process your customer follows today. Identify the expensive or unreliable step. Show what improves, who authorizes adoption, and why the customer would renew. This is an editorial reading of Musa’s criteria, and a practical exercise even for a team raising money elsewhere.
A classroom beside the capital
Musa Labs expands the relationship beyond fundraising. It offers applied AI workshops, technical sessions, and custom training for founders, engineers, startup teams, and ecosystem organizations. A founder can encounter the platform while learning to build, before an investment discussion begins. An operator can contribute through teaching, mentoring, or judging a showcase.
There is a commercial education business here, too. Operators Circle lists a standard price of $300 annually or $30 monthly. A founding offer advertises $100 a year for the first 50 members. The package includes live classes, monthly master classes, a private Discord community, premium writing, and quarterly question-and-answer sessions with Smith.
Founding offer: $100/year for the first 50 members. Terms checked October 27, 2026.
The distinction matters: buying classes does not make someone a limited partner. Musa’s membership and cohort pages explicitly separate those offerings from the fund. For learners, the purchase is education and community. For allocators, the proposition is exposure to early-stage enterprise software through a venture investment.
What the learning actually costs
The advertised Agentic AI Systems in Production cohort adds a more demanding option. Listed for July 13 through August 20, 2026, it carried a $2,750 price, with a 10 percent member discount. Its curriculum moved from agent architecture and tool use to memory, evaluations, guardrails, deployment, and monitoring.
The prerequisites narrow the audience: working Python knowledge, experience with an LLM API, and an agent project to develop. That is a useful boundary. A beginner seeking orientation and an engineer shipping a production system need different instruction. Musa also describes sponsored credential training with Microsoft, free to accepted learners, distributed through community partners.
Summer of Code addresses another gap. The ten-week externship matches computer-science students with early-stage companies for engineering projects, mentorship, workshops, and a concluding showcase. Musa says students receive compensation and emphasizes recruiting underrepresented talent. For participating startups, the attraction is a structured route to contributors who can work on an actual product.
Organizations have their own entry point. Musa offers founder-readiness sessions covering positioning, early traction, and enterprise selling, alongside event strategy and custom community programming. Its prospective clients include accelerators, incubators, portfolio-support platforms, and technical communities. A partner can commission a workshop or co-host an event. This makes the platform relevant to organizations trying to develop a founder community, as well as individual companies seeking investment.
The numbers need their dates
Fundraising has its own vocabulary trap. Musa Capital Fund I’s September 3, 2024, SEC amendment recorded a $25 million offering and $1.48 million sold to four investors. Those are different numbers describing different things. The first is the offering size; the second is reported sales at that historical moment. Neither should quietly become a present-day performance claim.
The broader model depends on execution of an equally ordinary kind. Operators need relevant expertise and time to contribute. Founders need to turn feedback into a product buyers will keep. Musa offers workshops, advisory programming, and partner events around that work. Its proposition is most persuasive where a useful introduction can lead to a specific technical or commercial decision.
For a founder, the invitation is concrete: bring a workflow, a customer, and a reason your team understands both. For an operator, bring the experience that helps the next team avoid an expensive mistake. Musa has built several ways for those people to meet. What gives those meetings value is what they can get done afterward.