Fitz Gate Ventures

Jim Cohen and Mark Poag serve as General Partners and make all investment decisions. Cohen previously co-founded Main Street Capital and held senior roles at Morgan Stanley and Simpson Thacher. Poag is a former software entrepreneur who led Datacert through rapid growth and sale. Both teach venture capital at Rice University and Princeton.

Fitz Gate relies on its proprietary 'Friends of Fitz' community — hundreds of startup founders, venture capitalists, university professors, and senior executives who refer companies and assist with diligence. The firm's GPs also source deals through their teaching and mentoring roles at Rice University, Princeton, Techstars NYC, and the National Science Foundation I-Corps program. This network referred thousands of companies for Fitz Gate to review.

Rice University's Office of Innovation is an anchor investor in Fitz Gate's third fund. The relationship goes deeper than a limited-partner commitment — GPs Jim Cohen and Mark Poag serve as adjunct professors at Rice's Jones School of Business and mentor startups through the Rice Alliance and the Lilie Lab. This academic partnership gives Fitz Gate early visibility into university-originated deep-tech startups.

Fitz Gate is an early-stage firm that writes initial checks of $500,000 to $1 million and reserves capital for follow-on rounds. The firm will lead, co-invest, or invest alone. Its strategy spans pre-seed through Series A, with a demonstrated willingness to be the first institutional investor — as it was for Quantum Circuits.

Fitz Gate runs a generalist fund with a sub-focus on deep tech and hard tech, including technology transfer out of research universities. The portfolio spans AI hardware, quantum computing, enterprise software, digital health, and consumer. Recent exits in deep tech — Celestial AI and Quantum Circuits — have reinforced this specialization within the broader generalist mandate.

Fitz Gate actively courts follow-on investment from top-tier venture firms and has a track record of attracting them. After Fitz Gate invested, portfolio companies raised subsequent rounds from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Bezos Expeditions, Bessemer, KKR, BlackRock, and Temasek. The firm frames this as validation of its independent sourcing and selection capability.

The combination of a 400-plus-person 'Friends of Fitz' advisory network and permanent university affiliation creates a sourcing and diligence engine that rivals much larger firms. The GPs' adjunct faculty roles at Rice and Princeton embed the firm inside two major research ecosystems, while the Friends network provides portable business development for portfolio companies — introductions to customers, partners, and later-stage investors that a typical emerging manager cannot offer.