We are an AI-native
fund
Failup is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm investing at the earliest moments of company creation.
Our approach is simple: conviction before consensus. We look for clarity of thought, depth of ambition, and teams building from first principles.

For us, AI is not the end but the means. All value creation starts from identifying a problem. If you're not using AI to solve that specific problem someone else will beat you to it. We as a fund have built our own AI tools to move smarter, scale faster, and support our portfolio with greater precision. Being AI-native doesn’t just mean investing in the category. It means rethinking how a modern venture firm operates.

Like the founders we back, we live and work at the edge of what’s possible. The future won’t belong to those who waited for certainty. It will belong to those bold enough to build it.
FAILUP IN NUMBERS
3
General Partners
We believe small and efficient teams can build amazing things, especially now in the AI era. We are expanding our team carefully with a couple of supernovas soon. Our AI clones already work with us.
2
Offices
San Francisco and Helsinki. The best of the US and the Nordics,
20
23
Founded
Our first fund of launched in July 2023.
29
Portfolio companies
Across San Francisco, New York, Helsinki, London
$
1M
Ticket size
Our typical pre-seed and seed first check size is between $500K-1M and we reserve more for follow-on investment. We lead, co-lead or join others. The semantics don't matter to us, great founders do.  
Areas of investment
AI for Work

Agents that work alongside employees to boost productivity, reduce errors, and free people to focus on higher-value work.

We have all used AI to solve small or big problems in our lives already. We all do that on a daily basis already. AI is doing work for us already. And it's only going to get better and do more of it. We should not fear that, we should celebrate that.

Even if you love your profession or job, there are things that AI can do for you so that you can focus on the parts of the job you actually love and excel doing. As a doctor, do you love writing patient notes or do you love finding solutions and cures for your patients? As a lawyer, do you love to write footnotes or do you love to see your clients win a deal or case? As a sales person, do you love to dig information from your CRM and Google or do you love to spend time with clients and close more deals?

AI doing our work and freeing more time for us to do what we love is a blessing and we need more of it.

AI Advancement

The infrastructure and data services for building, training, securing and scaling the next generation of AI agents.

If we believe AI is the most efficient and versatile technology to build products that solve massive and critical problems in our lives, then we have to invest in the advancement of that technology.

Sure the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world are pushing the envelope on LLMs and NVIDIA is the de-facto compute provider for those, but that does not mean tiny startups shouldn't or couldn't both augment and challenge the big players. We have aportfolio company that is selling training data sets to all the major foundational model companies to enable their models to solve more problems. We have a portfolio company that is pushing science to build an order of magnitude better XPUs to overtake NVIDIA. All you have to do is believe you can do it and then go do it.

In addition there are many topics from tooling to cyber security where there is major value to be created in this new paradigm of technology.

AI for Life

Consumer applications that help people save time at home, learn new skills, live healthier, and discover new ways to spend their energy and creativity.

Why is any technology being built fundamentally? The simple answer is to make our lives easier. The end beneficiary of the whole technology system is the individual directly or indirectly. But we know there are a myriad of topics that AI can directly solve for to make people's lives more meaningful.

You can build AI doctors to provide free primary healthcare for all humankind. You can build games that help people learn new skills and unleash their creativity. You can help people buy and sell their goods smarter. This is what our portfolio companies are doing. The only limit is imagination. How are you making our lives better with AI?