The number in The 98's name is not a fund size, a founding year or a clever Manhattan address. It is the part of the venture market that women-led startups were largely not getting when Lynda Clarizio and Joy Marcus shaped their thesis. If those companies received roughly 2 percent of venture dollars, the founders reasoned, the other 98 percent described both the problem and the opportunity. The name is a tiny piece of arithmetic with a large accusation tucked inside it: conventional venture pattern-matching may be leaving returns on the table.
The New York firm launched in the third quarter of 2022, three years after Clarizio and Marcus began investing together through a group called Brilliant Friends. Their friendship goes back much further. They met as undergraduates at Princeton, then took long routes through law, media, advertising, data, startups, public-company boards and venture investing. By the time they formed The 98, neither needed a seminar on how a company actually behaves when a product launch slips, a sales channel stalls or a board meeting turns uncomfortable.
A thesis hiding in ordinary aggravations
At first glance, the portfolio refuses to sit still. Oply helps homeowners anticipate maintenance and connect with service professionals. Break Sports lets players, venues, instructors and brands organize recreational play. Humanitru gives nonprofits a cleaner way to manage supporter data and donor engagement. Strella monitors ethylene around produce so packers and retailers can make better decisions before food becomes waste. Cambri tests product concepts. Stratyfy applies transparent machine learning to lending risk. Paladin routes and measures pro bono legal work. Limina, formerly Private AI, protects sensitive information before organizations use it in analytics and AI.
The sectors are different; the irritants rhyme. A homeowner is surprised by a repair. A grocery operator learns too late that fruit is ripening. A nonprofit has donor information scattered across systems. A bank wants better decisions without turning a model into a black box. A law firm has skilled volunteers but inefficient ways to match them with needs. These are not science-fiction markets. They are familiar systems with a tax on time, trust or waste. The 98 tends to back software, data products and marketplaces that remove that tax.
“We launched The 98 because we believe women-led businesses are an undervalued asset class.”Lynda Clarizio and Joy Marcus, writing on the firm's perspective
The second product is judgment
Money is the first product of any venture fund. The 98's second is a particular kind of operating judgment. Clarizio ran Nielsen's U.S. media business and AOL's global advertising business, held leadership roles at AppNexus, INVISION and Advertising.com, and worked on investments and acquisitions. Marcus led digital businesses at AOL, Time Warner, Condé Nast and MTV Networks, served as chief executive of Bloglovin', and invested through Gotham Ventures and Jerusalem Venture Partners. Both trained as lawyers. Between them sit decades of boardrooms, budgets, M&A processes and platform shifts.
That experience becomes more useful when it is specific. A founder does not need “strategic support” in the abstract. She may need to price an enterprise contract, recruit a finance leader, decide whether a channel partner has too much leverage or sharpen the sentence that explains why a customer should care. The firm's public team page lists a wide network of operating advisers with backgrounds in product, audience measurement, consumer health, human resources, media, finance and business development. It is less an oversized payroll than a switchboard of people who have seen versions of the problem before.
Who buys what The 98 is selling?
There are two customer groups. Limited partners buy access to a focused venture strategy and hope the portfolio produces financial returns. Founders receive capital and the firm's assistance in exchange for equity or an equity-linked stake. Public materials do not disclose the fund's size, fee structure, carry or standard check. That opacity is normal for a private early-stage firm, but it means The 98 is best understood through the decisions it does reveal: the founders it backs, the problems they target and the follow-on milestones those companies reach.
Several milestones offer useful, if incomplete, evidence. Stratyfy announced $10 million in funding in 2023 with The 98 among the investors. Cambri raised €8 million in October 2024, adding Octopus Ventures and S4S Ventures alongside existing investors including The 98. Humanitru closed a $3 million round in February 2025 with The 98 participating. Paladin acquired Pro Bono Manager and partnered with Pro Bono Net. These events do not prove the fund's returns, which remain private. They do show portfolio companies winning new capital, products, customers and strategic options.
The customer problem
Talented founders can be filtered out by pattern recognition, smaller networks and a funding process that has changed more slowly than the technology market.
The fund's answer
Source women-led companies deliberately, invest early, and attach operators whose experience can reduce avoidable mistakes as the business grows.
Different by construction
The 98 operates in a recognizable group of investors focused on women founders, alongside firms and networks such as Female Founders Fund, BBG Ventures, Halogen Ventures, The Helm and 37 Angels. It also competes with every generalist seed investor hunting good enterprise software, fintech, health technology, media and marketplace deals. Its differentiation is not exclusivity over a demographic. Any fund can invest in a woman-led company. The distinction is that The 98 makes the overlooked segment central to sourcing, brand and portfolio logic, then adds two partners with substantial operating resumes.
That construction creates tradeoffs. A focused thesis can see opportunities broad firms miss, but it must still win competitive rounds and avoid confusing social intent with commercial evidence. A large adviser network can deliver unusually relevant help, but only when introductions turn into action. A small core team can be fast and personal, but it cannot manufacture time. The model works when selection and support reinforce one another: find capable founders earlier, help them clear practical obstacles, and let later customers and investors validate the judgment.
The portfolio also clarifies what “women-led” means in practice. It is a selection rule, not a product category. Customers do not buy Stratyfy because of the composition of its founding team; they buy a way to make lending decisions more transparent and inclusive. Retailers do not install Strella sensors to decorate a diversity report; they want to lose less produce. Nonprofits choose Humanitru because fundraising data is hard to organize. The investment thesis may begin with who has been overlooked, but each company survives on the ordinary demands of price, performance and usefulness.
That separation matters because impact language can blur accountability. The 98 states a social ambition - changing who receives venture capital - while presenting financial performance as the mechanism that makes the change durable. If the companies grow, later investors have to update their pattern. If they do not, a good intention will not rescue the portfolio. In this model, the most persuasive argument is not a conference panel or a statistic. It is a customer renewing, a founder raising the next round, or an acquisition that returns capital. The mission creates the searchlight; business results decide what it finds.
Where the firm fits now
The 98 belongs to a newer generation of specialist seed funds built around the limits of traditional pattern recognition. Some specialize by industry, geography or technical architecture. This one specializes by an underfunded leadership pattern, then ranges across industries where its network has earned context. The approach is especially suited to enterprise and technology-enabled services, where distribution, partnerships, governance and customer trust can matter as much as a dazzling demo.
Its recent portfolio also shows the thesis stretching without becoming shapeless. Oply and Break Sports move the firm into consumer-facing marketplaces with operational complexity. Humanitru deepens the enterprise-software side. Strella mixes sensors with recurring software economics. Limina sits directly in the debate over using sensitive data safely in AI. The common thread is not a fashionable acronym. It is a founder using technology to make an existing market less wasteful, less opaque or less irritating.
For a founder, the practical test is straightforward. The 98 is likely relevant if the company is women-led, early, technology-driven and working in a field where commerce, media, health, finance, law, data or marketing expertise matters. The firm can help with capital, but its more interesting promise is access to people who have operated through the mess between a good product and a durable company. For an investor, the wager is equally plain: the funding gap reflects bias and missed information, not an absence of worthy businesses.
The name keeps that wager visible. It is difficult to say “The 98” without asking what happened to the other two, who controlled the rest and whether the ratio should have survived this long. Four years after launch, the firm has enough companies to show what its pattern looks like, but not enough public exit data to settle the argument. Venture funds take years to mature. For now, The 98 is doing something more concrete than making a point: it is assembling a portfolio that can eventually prove or disprove one.