Pear Ventures

A venture capital firm specialising in pre-seed and seed-stage investment. The team is made up of founders and operators turned investors who have founded, scaled and sold companies to acquirers including Cisco, Instacart and Medium, and the firm states it has seeded companies now worth over $300 billion. Beyond capital, the model is built around a hands-on founder services team that operates as an extension of a portfolio company's own staff across four disciplines: talent, founder-led sales and go-to-market, marketing and PR, and fundraising. Its in-house recruiting group - described as the largest talent team in early-stage venture - has made more than 175 hires for portfolio companies at no cost to founders, running over 2,000 candidate-founder conversations with an 80 percent candidate closing rate, roughly 30 percent above the industry average, and averaging 2.5 hires per supported founder over the past year. Talent support includes a dedicated talent partner per founder, candidate sourcing through a Talent Collective, headcount planning and hiring strategy, interview-process design, free access to plug-and-play recruiting software, leveling and compensation benchmarking frameworks, and a library of recruiting playbooks. Go-to-market work covers customer validation, pitch development and sales preparation; fundraising support covers positioning, pitch-deck refinement and warm introductions to later-stage investors. The firm also runs PearX, a partner-led accelerator programme, and Pear Garage, a community programme for early founders. It publishes founder education content on early-round fundraising and portfolio news, and counts founders of companies such as DoorDash, Gusto, Affinity, Listen Labs and Hertha Metals among those it has backed or supported.