On Vast Ventures' portfolio page, an AI litigation tool sits a few scrolls from an organic coffee brand. A medical-coding robot shares a roof with a cross-border neobank, a restaurant delivery operator, a lab-grown diamond maker and a company trying to help people hear conversation in a crowded room. If you arrived looking for a tidy sector thesis, the page can feel like someone emptied several funds into one browser tab.
The disorder is only apparent. Vast is not organized around a vertical. It is organized around a set of desired outcomes: improve health and happiness; preserve resources; increase human potential and productivity; deepen knowledge, empathy and connection; and challenge industries that block those aims. The manifesto is broad enough to admit a dog-treat subscription and specific enough to reject a clever product that leaves the world no better.
A generalist with a filter
Vast is a venture firm, not a software company. Its product is a bundle of judgment, money and post-investment attention. It invests at seed, Series A and growth stages, and it sometimes uses special-purpose vehicles for larger later rounds. A public essay on national security put unusually concrete numbers around that approach: $100,000 to $2 million for pre-seed and seed software opportunities, and potential $2 million to $20 million SPVs for more mature hard-tech companies. Those figures describe one thesis area, not a universal menu, but they show a fund willing to move between experiments and scale.
Founders are the visible users. They bring a company, a pitch and a problem; Vast brings capital, pattern recognition and a network. Limited partners sit on the other side of the business, supplying capital in exchange for venture exposure. Public filings describe institutional, family-office and individual investors as potential capital sources. The familiar economics of venture - management fees and a share of investment profits - sit behind the model, though Vast does not publish its fee schedule.
Its market position is easier to see by comparison. Sector funds advertise deep specialization. Large multistage firms advertise resources and follow-on firepower. Accelerators advertise a repeatable launch system. Vast sits between those models: a small, operator-heavy fund with a wide sector aperture and a stated willingness to stay involved. Its closest alternatives for a New York founder are other early-stage generalists and the specialist funds competing inside healthcare, fintech, consumer and climate.
“We haven't seen every movie, but know most of the plots.”Vast Ventures, on its operating experience
It is a better line than the usual promise of “value-add.” The team openly mentions both successes and failures, which gives the metaphor some weight. Doug Chertok spent 15 years starting and operating real-estate and hospitality companies and venture funds before founding Vast. Aniq Rahman built and sold Instinctiv, then became president of Moat before Oracle acquired it. Sean McCroskey arrived from Atento Capital after a Venture for America fellowship. These are people who have had to sell, hire, ship and occasionally absorb a bad ending.
The portfolio is the argument
The marquee names are varied: Coinbase and Ripple in digital finance; Sweetgreen and Bark in consumer; Zocdoc, Clover Health and DocGo in care; Ginkgo Bioworks and Diamond Foundry in deep technology; Moat and ASAPP in enterprise software. The common problem is friction embedded in a large system. Booking a doctor, moving money across borders, measuring whether an ad was seen, getting dinner, cooling a bed or manufacturing a diamond all sound unrelated until you notice how much inconvenience an incumbent market has trained people to accept.
These bars visualize the firm's stated goals, not portfolio allocation or investment performance.
Healthcare makes the pattern especially visible. Fabric builds operating software intended to move patients through virtual and in-person care more efficiently. Fathom automates medical coding. SiteRx works on matching patients with clinical trials and reducing submission work. Forus, formerly Tandem, handles the administrative maze between a prescription and the patient who needs it. In May 2026, Forus said it was used by thousands of practices and health systems in all 50 states. None of these companies discovered a new molecule. They attack the paperwork, coordination and capacity failures surrounding medicine.
The consumer bets tackle a friendlier face of the same issue. ClassPass aggregates fragmented fitness inventory. Zocdoc makes appointment supply searchable. Ritual compresses the office-lunch queue. Eight Sleep turns a passive mattress into a responsive piece of health hardware. In March 2026, Eight Sleep announced a $50 million strategic round led by Tether Investments at a $1.5 billion valuation. The company said it had been free-cash-flow positive in 2025 and was developing products that can adjust temperature, elevation and firmness more proactively.
Wide does not mean random
The risk in any manifesto is that every deal can be made to fit after the fact. “Increase human potential” is a generous umbrella. Vast counters that looseness with a more practical founder test. Chertok has said the team looks for unique vision, knowledge of the market and competition, passion and energy. His pitch advice is even shorter: big vision, strong model, know your market and competition. Those are not mystical qualities. A founder can demonstrate them in a deck and lose them in a diligence call.
- Define the human outcome before naming the market category.
- Show exactly where the incumbent system creates cost, delay or frustration.
- Know the alternatives, including the option of doing nothing.
- Bring a model sturdy enough to survive contact with a large vision.
- Ask for help clearly; Vast says it works best with founders who do.
That last point matters to the firm's culture. Vast says it is available around the clock and loves founders who ask for help. No investor can prove that promise on a website. But the phrasing tells entrepreneurs how to use the relationship: make the request specific. An introduction to a hospital buyer, feedback on a pricing model or help filling an executive role is easier to act on than a vague plea for “support.” The best version of the Vast service is therefore collaborative. Capital opens the door; a founder has to pull the firm through it.
The approach also leaves room to develop new expertise. In 2024, McCroskey published a long national-security thesis covering secure supply-chain software, open-source intelligence, skilled-worker retention, rare-earth recycling and distributed manufacturing. The memo separated “softech power” from “hardtech power” and attached different stages, traction requirements and check sizes to each. It was the manifesto becoming an operating document: resource sustainability and human potential translated into specific procurement problems.
The long game is in the plumbing
Recent portfolio news shows Vast leaning further into infrastructure that ordinary users may never see. Forus is building a network among doctors, pharmacies, payers and drug companies. Diamond Foundry is pushing lab-grown diamond wafers toward semiconductor and power-electronics uses. Ripple continues to pursue regulated payment and custody infrastructure. Fortell uses large neural networks and custom silicon to separate speech from noise in hearing aids; the company opened a New York clinic after years of research and landed on Forbes' 2026 list of startups to watch.
These are not quick products to explain at a cocktail party. They sit inside reimbursement, manufacturing, financial regulation and clinical behavior. Their customers may be consumers, clinicians, health systems, enterprises or governments, but the sale usually requires trust and technical proof. Vast's portfolio suggests an appetite for that complexity, balanced by consumer companies that provide faster feedback and clearer demand.
The firm is small enough that key-person risk is real and broad enough that specialization can look thin beside a dedicated healthcare or climate fund. Its public material does not disclose returns, current assets under management or fund performance. Founders deciding among term sheets still have to ask the unglamorous questions: Who will lead the work? How much follow-on capital is reserved? Which customers can the fund actually reach? What happened when a portfolio company struggled?
Yet the broadness has a benefit. Patterns can travel. Hospitality can teach healthcare something about capacity. Consumer onboarding can make financial tools less punishing. Software can expose a bottleneck in manufacturing. A fund that moves among those worlds can carry an idea across the border before an industry specialist notices the passport stamp.
The portfolio is broad by category and narrow by irritation: it keeps finding systems people use because they must, then backing a less painful version.YesPress analysis
That may be Vast Ventures' most useful lesson. A thesis does not have to predict the next hot sector. It has to make choices repeatable. The five goals on the manifesto are the first screen; founder quality, market knowledge and business-model strength are the second. Everything else - mattress temperatures, medical codes, diamond wafers and payment rails - is implementation detail.
Go deeper
Vast's website carries the manifesto, team biographies and current portfolio. Its Medium publication is more useful for founders who want to see the investment logic in motion, including the healthcare-capacity case for Fabric and the detailed national-security memo. LinkedIn is where the small team posts portfolio developments.