CEO Venture Fund

Managing Director Chip Casteel has led the firm since 1997 and chairs the investment committee. The committee structure is unusual in that it includes limited partners with domain expertise relevant to each specific deal, meaning the composition of the decision-making body shifts based on the sector and stage of the opportunity under review.

The firm sources primarily through its own limited-partner base of roughly 200 current and former CEOs. These operators refer deals from within their industries, and because each LP is expected to participate in technical diligence, the referral network is self-reinforcing. The firm also receives inbound opportunities from venture capital syndicates, startup accelerators, and university technology-transfer offices in the Mid-Atlantic region.

CEO Venture Fund is structured as a multi-family office but operates with the investment discipline of an early-stage venture firm. Unlike a single-family office that deploys one family's capital, the fund pools capital from its network of LP families and deploys it on a deal-by-deal basis, without a traditional blind-pool fund structure or fixed fundraising cycle.

The firm focuses on seed and Series A rounds, typically writing initial checks between $1 million and $5 million. It regularly reserves follow-on capital for later-stage rounds in its highest-performing portfolio companies, acting as a patient, evergreen source of capital rather than a fund-life-cycle-driven investor.

The firm has historically avoided capital-intensive sectors such as biotech, clean-energy hardware, and semiconductor manufacturing, where the due-diligence timelines and capital requirements are a poor fit for its deal-by-deal capital-call structure. It has also stayed largely absent from consumer internet and direct-to-consumer brands, concentrating instead on enterprise-facing technology businesses where its LP operators can provide meaningful product and go-to-market guidance.

CEO Venture Fund invests exclusively through direct deals into operating companies. It does not make fund-of-funds commitments to external venture capital managers, nor does it participate in secondary transactions as a regular part of its strategy. The value proposition to both LPs and portfolio companies depends on direct engagement between the operator network and each startup.

The firm has not publicly disclosed the specific wealth origins of its limited-partner base. What is known is that the LP group comprises current and former CEOs and senior executives, predominantly from industrial, technology, healthcare, and financial-services companies in the eastern United States, suggesting wealth generated from operating-company exits, executive compensation, and multi-generational business ownership rather than a single liquidity event.