We’re here to build with you however you need us.
We’ve been there and we’ve got the experience to back it up.
This is a fund about founders and relationships
"The founder's journey is lonely. While the Board is there to serve the company, you need someone looking out for your best interests. Sean has played that role for me for almost a decade. He is my first call when faced with a big decision. He has a rare skill of being able to understand the nuance behind the situation and break it down nicely like a math problem."
“Sean unlocked my growth and enjoyment along the Founder/CEO journey. At our company, we can use his frameworks for everything, including how we hire execs, create our operating plans, and carry out our all hands. Sean will always be my first call.”
“Mark is an exceptional advisor and mentor for early-stage founders. He provides a rare combination — a wealth of experience across multiple industries, the ability to translate his learnings to help each company's unique challenges, and the empathy to meet founders where they are. Luminopia has benefited tremendously from having Mark involved since the early days; any other company would as well.”
“Sean has been the best coach I have ever had. As a founder-CEO, I find it incredible to be coached by someone who has experienced that specific journey multiple times. His clarity of thought and depth of questions was transformative in my journey to scale my company over the last year.”
Ways we will help
Compared to the other guys...
FAQs
In this section, you'll find quick answers to some of the common questions we get, offering insight into what working with Near Horizon looks like for startup founders.
Our partners join your team and do everything and anything, just like a co-founder. We do what it takes to get you from zero to one. We help companies with everything from customer research to product design in Figma, developing ML models, coding the product, initial go-to-market (marketing and sales), recruiting, and fundraising.
We typically work with solo founders at company formation! We help with everything, including how to set up your company. All you need is an unfair competitive advantage, a problem you want to solve in a market you know well, and an AI-focused solution.
No! You just need to have a problem you want to solve in a market you know well. You don’t even need to know exactly how to solve the problem. We can help you design, build, and sell your product to solve that problem.
We have built products using most types of modern machine learning, including LLMs, recommender systems, regression models, and more. We don’t try to build your product using what we know; we choose the right approach for your product. This can include inventing and patenting new approaches, which we’ve done for several of our companies.
You are the CEO, and this is your company we’re building. We cannot run it for you, which means you must be on point for essential tasks like hiring and fundraising. We can coach you on how to do these well, but we can’t do them for you!
We enter all our relationships with the expectation that we’ll do terrific work together and enjoy ourselves on the journey. But it’s always possible something doesn’t click. If that happens, you can always part ways with us (and vice versa). While we’d keep any equity we’ve already vested or purchased through investment, it’s your company, and you will own the vast majority of the equity. We want you to be the final decision-maker. Always.
We have a few bright lines: we only work on problems whose solutions will make the world a better place with entrepreneurs we enjoy working with. Our entrepreneurs must be secure enough to both be coachable and know it’s their company to run. We want the problem you’re taking on to matter, and the proposed solution must have AI as an essential component.
Still have questions?
Contact our team to see if your startup would be a right fit for Near Horizon, you’re curious about our process, or you want to share your business idea and are ready to get to work!
Get in touch