Foundry

Foundry

Brad Feld, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson established Foundry in 2007 as a thematic, early-stage venture firm anchored in Boulder, Colorado. The partnership emerged from Feld's prior work with Mobius Venture Capital and a deeply held conviction that geography shouldn't limit access to transformative software founders — a posture that seeded what became the firm's national brand from a non-coastal base. Foundry closed its first institutional fund in 2007 and has consistently operated with a four-partner generalist partnership model since inception. Foundry targets seed and Series A rounds in US and Canadian software companies, with a primary focus on enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity, applied AI, and frontier tech. The firm leads or co-leads the majority of its rounds, reserving significant capital for follow-on investments. The partnership historically invested from vehicles in the $225M to $500M range. Known portfolio exits include Fitbit, which went public in 2015 before being acquired by Google in 2021, and Zayo Group, a bandwidth infrastructure provider Feld backed that listed in 2014 and was later taken private. Other disclosed positions have included companies like Cloudability, MobileDay, and FullContact. Foundry called its final fund, Foundry Group 2022, a $500M vehicle, and later announced Foundry Next 2024, formally signaling the transition from the founding partnership structure to an evolved multi-generational firm (per the firm, 2024). The firm operates a flat, consent-based partnership model where all four founding partners share equal economics and decision-making authority — an unusual structure in venture that has allowed for continuity across nearly two decades. Foundry maintains offices in Boulder, Denver, San Francisco, and New York. The partnership has long been active in building local startup ecosystems; Feld co-founded the Techstars accelerator in Boulder in 2006, and the firm maintains connective tissue to that network without formal affiliation. In early 2024, Foundry launched its Next fund series, officially transitioning the emerging next-generation leadership into senior decision-making roles while the founding partners step back from day-to-day new-investment activity (per the firm, 2024). The partnership's long-publicized plan for succession is Foundry's most distinct structural feature. For years, the founders published a blog detailing their intent to retire the Foundry Group brand and cycle into a successor firm — an almost unheard-of act of succession transparency in venture. That plan materialized in 2024 with the close of the new vehicle, where the new generation of partners, including Jaclyn Hester and Chris Moody, now lead new-deal activity while the original four partners complete active portfolio management. No other venture firm of Foundry's vintage has executed a pre-announced, decade-long succession playbook in full public view.