Highland Ventures Group

HVG's primary sourcing edge is geographic. The firm is based in Boulder, Colorado, and focuses the majority of its capital on Colorado-headquartered startups, a market with strong engineering density from the University of Colorado, NIST, and NOAA labs but far less institutional seed competition than the Bay Area, New York, or Boston. Peter Bell and JD Ross have made this a deliberate part of their strategy since relocating from San Francisco in 2020, and they operate a Founder Fellowship to surface technical founders before they formally raise.

Investment decisions are made by Managing Partner Peter Bell and General Partner JD Ross. The firm deliberately stays under 10 people to preserve decision speed and depth of partner involvement, with both partners typically acting as the primary go-to-market sounding boards for portfolio founders during the 18 months after a first close.

HVG writes pre-seed and seed-stage checks, generally ranging from $500,000 to $2 million, into company formations. The firm leads or co-leads a meaningful share of its rounds and prefers concentrated ownership positions rather than small passive allocations, a posture enabled by the thinner institutional seed market in its core Colorado geography.

The firm reviews select deals in adjacent Mountain West markets like Denver and Salt Lake City, but public filings and portfolio disclosures indicate that over two-thirds of HVG's capital has historically been deployed into Colorado-headquartered companies. The Colorado focus is an explicit part of the firm's strategy rather than a passive outcome.

The HVG Founder Fellowship, launched in 2022, is a no-equity program providing stipends and mentorship to pre-seed technical founders based in the Mountain West. It runs in cohorts, with applications for the second cohort opening in June 2023, and serves dual purposes as community-building and early-access sourcing for the firm.

HVG's stated focus is enterprise SaaS, applied artificial intelligence, climate and industrial technology, mobility, and healthcare IT. The firm does not publicly describe consumer social, crypto, or media/content as areas of active pursuit, and its portfolio — which includes companies like JumpCloud and Houseware — reflects a sustained preference for enterprise and deep-tech verticals.

Both founding partners, Peter Bell and JD Ross, previously worked at Atomic — the San Francisco-based venture studio that co-founded companies like Hims & Hers and Bungalow. They left Atomic to relocate to Boulder and start HVG in 2020. While the two firms share a venture-studio heritage and founders who understand company-building at the formation stage, they are operationally separate entities with distinct investment teams, geographies, and fund structures.