Artemis Goes Hunting in the Markets Other VCs Call Uncomfortable
Stephanie Campbell and Diana Murakhovskaya built a $36 million fund on a plain bet: the founders and problems most investors skip - elder care, divorce, food trucks, lactation - are where the overlooked returns hide.
Most venture pitches open with a market map, a hockey-stick chart, and a promise about the future of software. The Artemis Fund is more interested in the parts of American life people would rather not discuss at dinner. Ending a marriage. Moving a parent into care. Feeding a newborn at 3 a.m. Getting a food truck paid before the lunch rush. These are enormous, high-frequency problems, and for most of venture capital's history they have been badly under-funded.
That gap is the whole business. The Artemis Fund is a seed-stage venture firm, founded in 2019 and run out of Houston and New York, that leads investment rounds for women founders building in three sectors it returns to again and again: fintech, caretech, and commerce enablement. In 2024 it closed a $36 million second fund - more than double its debut - with a roster of institutional backers that included Amazon, Bank of America, Bank of Montreal, Nuveen's Churchill Asset Management, and Texas Capital Bank.
01 / The ThesisThe value in the overlooked
The firm is named after Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt and a protector of women. The logo is an archer drawing a bow, and the metaphor is not decoration. Artemis plays offense, and it aims where other funds do not look. Co-founder and general partner Stephanie Campbell has put the sourcing strategy about as plainly as anyone in venture will: much of the opportunity sits in categories people avoid talking about.
"A lot of people don't like to talk about uncomfortable things, even though they're so prevalent in our lives." Stephanie Campbell, Co-Founder + General Partner
The logic is an arbitrage on attention. When a category is awkward - divorce, elder care, wigs for chemo patients, lactation rooms at work - fewer founders build in it, fewer investors fund it, and the ones who do face less competition for the same deal. Artemis treats that discomfort as a signal rather than a warning. The result is a portfolio that reads less like a trend deck and more like a list of things every household actually deals with.
There is a discipline hiding inside that contrarianism. The three sectors Artemis returns to - fintech, caretech, and commerce enablement - are not a grab bag. They are the financial, physical, and economic scaffolding of an ordinary family: the tools that build wealth, the services that hold a household together when someone gets sick or old, and the software that keeps a small business solvent. The firm sums this up as investing in "resilience," and it is a useful lens. A company that helps a food-truck owner get paid faster and a company that coordinates care for an aging parent look unrelated on a pitch deck, but they solve the same underlying problem: keeping people financially and practically upright.
02 / Who It BacksFounders the rest of venture never meets
The other half of the gap is who gets funded. Women-founded companies still receive a small fraction of U.S. venture dollars, and the numbers get starker for Black, Latina, and immigrant founders. Artemis was built specifically to close that distance. Every company in its portfolio is female-founded, and more than 60 percent have Black, Latinx, or immigrant leadership.
The names give the thesis texture. Naborforce connects older adults with on-demand local help for the errands and company that fall between full-time care and going it alone. HopSkipDrive moves kids to school when a parent cannot. Hello Divorce turns a painful legal process into a guided online service. Goodfynd builds the payments and ordering rails for food-truck vendors. Work & Mother runs lactation suites for office buildings. Max Retail helps independent stores sell through unsold inventory. Upgrade makes custom wigs and extensions. Different industries, one pattern: real customers, real revenue, real problems that were waiting on a founder close enough to the pain to solve them.
"Female founders don't have the same access to venture capital. We connect them to the right firms to ensure they're not wasting time." Stephanie Campbell
03 / The PlaybookProof before the pitch
Artemis is not a spray-and-pray seed fund. It leads or co-leads rounds, which means it sets terms and takes a board-level role rather than sprinkling small checks across dozens of names. And it tends to wait for evidence: the firm favors what it calls mature seed - companies already generating around $1 million in revenue. In a market that often funds a narrative, Artemis prefers a receipt.
The support does not stop at the wire transfer. Portfolio founders get hands-on help with financial modeling, KPI tracking, and warm introductions to a network of later-stage co-investors for follow-on rounds - work partly subsidized by grants from SSBCI and Pivotal Ventures so that founder support does not come out of returns. The scoreboard suggests it is working: Artemis portfolio companies have collectively raised roughly $250 million in follow-on capital, and 2023 portfolio revenue topped $100 million.
04 / The BusinessHow a fund like this makes money
Structurally, Artemis is a closed-end venture fund. It raises capital from limited partners - institutions, banks, corporates, and family offices - deploys it as lead seed checks, and earns through management fees plus carried interest when portfolio companies exit or raise up-rounds. The limited partners are customers too, and general partner Diana Murakhovskaya says the relationship runs on candor.
"We're very transparent with our investors. We want them to understand what we're doing and why we're doing it." Diana Murakhovskaya, Co-Founder + General Partner
That transparency is part of the pitch to LPs like Amazon and Bank of America, who are backing both a financial return and a measurable widening of who gets funded. It is a notable vote of confidence in an emerging manager - and in Houston, a city rarely mentioned in the same breath as Sand Hill Road.
The economics also explain the fund's patience. Because Artemis leads rounds rather than following, and because it concentrates on companies with real revenue, it can hold meaningful ownership in a smaller number of names and stay close to each one. A $36 million fund is not trying to write a hundred checks; the plan for Fund II is roughly 20 new companies. That concentration is what makes the operating support - the financial modeling, the KPI reviews, the co-investor introductions - practical rather than performative. The firm has the bandwidth to actually show up.
05 / The TeamOperators, not tourists
The firm was founded by three women who had each spent years on the supply-and-demand sides of early-stage capital. Campbell previously ran the Houston Angel Network, one of the most active angel groups in the country, and brought an MBA from Rice. Murakhovskaya had a background in banking and had built one of the first accelerators focused on female founders. Founding partner Leslie Goldman Tepper rounded out a team that had, between them, already seen where the funding pipeline leaked. Today Artemis is a lean shop - around 18 people - investing nationally from offices in Houston and New York.
06 / The LandscapeWhere Artemis fits
Artemis sits within a small but growing set of funds built to correct venture's diversity gap, alongside names like BBG Ventures, Female Founders Fund, Chingona Ventures, and Rethink Impact. What distinguishes it is the combination: a lead-investor posture, a revenue-first discipline, a tight sector focus on fintech, care, and commerce, and a Southern base far from the coastal networks. The firm frames its own mission as building an "alpha pack of founders building technology for resilient families and businesses" - resilience being the through-line across all three verticals it funds.
Geography is part of the differentiation, not an accident of it. Sitting in Houston and New York rather than the Bay Area, Artemis sees founders who never make it onto coastal radar - operators in underserved cities and non-traditional profiles who would otherwise spend months trying to get a warm introduction. Being the fund that actually meets them first is its own form of proprietary deal flow, and it is hard to copy from a distance.
The larger wager is that these overlooked markets are not niches at all. Care of aging parents, financial tools for people the banking system underserves, and software for the small businesses that anchor local economies are each measured in the hundreds of billions. Artemis is betting that the founders closest to those problems - and long ignored by the industry - are the ones who will build the durable companies. It is a patient, unflashy strategy, and so far the follow-on checks keep validating it.