Include Venture Partners Management

Managing Partner Seth Unruh and Partner Maren Winnick jointly lead the firm's investment committee. Unruh brought institutional venture experience to the founding, while Winnick contributed operational expertise from prior roles inside scaled industrial and commercial companies. Allocations and follow-on decisions require consensus between the two partners, a structure designed to balance pure venture judgment with practitioner insight into how technology is actually procured and deployed by large operating companies.

Sourcing relies heavily on Maren Winnick's relationships within the executive ranks of industrial and commercial operating companies, giving the firm visibility into technologies being piloted or procured before those startups appear in generalist venture pipelines. Include supplements this with a narrower inbound channel from research universities with strong engineering programs in robotics, materials science, and energy systems. The firm does not operate a public scout network or content-marketing funnel.

Include Venture Partners operates as a traditional institutional venture firm managing pooled capital from external limited partners, not as a family office. The SEC-registered entity does not manage a single-family fortune, and its partnership structure follows a standard venture carried-interest model with a management company receiving fees on committed capital.

The firm makes only direct equity investments into operating companies and does not operate as a fund-of-funds. Include does not publish a program for backing other venture managers. Its follow-on reserve strategy implies a concentrated direct portfolio rather than a blended direct-and-fund approach.

Include targets early-stage companies, predominantly at Series A and B. The firm leads or co-leads rounds in this band and reserves meaningful allocation for follow-on investments in portfolio companies that demonstrate traction with industrial or commercial enterprise customers. Pre-seed and seed-stage checks appear only when the founding team has a verifiable commercial pilot with a named operating company.

As of mid-2025, Include has not announced any associated philanthropic foundation, donor-advised fund, or impact-allocated vehicle. The firm appears to operate with a pure for-profit venture mandate, and its limited-partner base is not publicly connected to any family philanthropy.

Include welcomes co-investment alongside other institutional venture firms, particularly in rounds where the syndicate benefits from one partner's domain expertise in a relevant industrial sector. The firm does not publicly disclose a closed co-investor club, but its willingness to co-lead with generalist funds signals an open syndication approach for the right board composition.