Fairhaven Capital

Founders Paul Ciriello and Rick Grinnell serve as managing directors and share the investment committee together. They have worked alongside each other since co-founding TD Capital Ventures in 2000, then raised Fairhaven's debut fund in 2007. The firm's small partnership structure means every term sheet requires agreement from both principals, with no junior investment professionals known to have check-writing authority.

The partnership relies on a network built over two decades of early-stage enterprise investing, anchored in Boston and extending to Silicon Valley. Because both founders operated initially inside a bank's venture arm, their sourcing channels include trusted relationships with technology founders, repeat entrepreneurs from prior portfolio companies, and co-investors who have worked alongside them since the TD Capital Ventures era.

Fairhaven invests directly into companies via priced equity rounds and does not publicly participate as a limited partner in other venture funds. The firm's structure as a direct venture investor is consistent with its historical approach at TD Capital Ventures, where Ciriello and Grinnell built a co-investment and direct-deal program rather than a fund-of-funds allocation model.

The firm concentrates on early-stage companies — predominantly seed and Series A rounds — with selective follow-on co-investments as portfolio companies scale. Fairhaven's known deals include leading the Series A in CloudLock, indicating a willingness to price and structure an initial institutional round when it has underwriting conviction rather than waiting for a later-stage syndicate to form.

Fairhaven's disclosed portfolio is enterprise-focused, and the firm has no public track record in consumer internet, biotechnology, or medical devices. Based on the partners' investment history, the firm has avoided capital-intensive sectors such as cleantech hardware and therapeutics, remaining concentrated on business-to-business software and technology infrastructure where the underwriting maps to their operational expertise.