Latitude

Co-founders Ahmed Al-Bassam and Romain Pailloux jointly lead investment decisions. Al-Bassam focuses on space and defense-tech origination, while Pailloux leads enterprise software and applied AI theses (per the firm's official communications). The partnership structure is deliberately small, with no external general partners publicly named, suggesting that all investment committee decisions rest with the founding team.

Latitude's sourcing model relies on geographic proximity to defense and aerospace research clusters. The firm maintains offices near MIT (Cambridge), Stanford (Palo Alto), and Israel's aerospace corridor (Tel Aviv), and partners cultivate relationships with principal investigators exiting Air Force Research Lab and DARPA programs. This university-and-lab-centric pipeline is distinct from the accelerator-to-Series-A funnel that characterizes most Bay Area venture firms.

Latitude leads and prices the rounds it participates in, typically writing the first institutional check at Series A or an equivalent pre-scale stage (per the firm's official communications). The firm takes board seats in a majority of its portfolio companies and constructs syndicates around its own term sheets, rather than joining rounds led by larger multi-stage funds.

Latitude concentrates on the first institutional round, which usually maps to Series A for companies that have already completed government-funded R&D or seed-stage technical milestones. The firm explicitly avoids seed-stage concept bets and does not pursue growth-stage or pre-IPO positions, maintaining a narrow band of stage focus across its portfolio.

The firm invests in space infrastructure, enterprise software, applied AI and machine learning, and industrial automation (per the firm's official communications). Within space, Latitude's activity centers on satellite manufacturing, orbital logistics, and space-domain awareness — segments where government procurement contracts provide early revenue visibility.

Latitude operates as a venture capital manager, but its multi-city footprint, long-duration holding posture, and concentration on capital-intensive deep-tech companies give it a profile closer to a project-finance hybrid than a typical SaaS-focused venture fund. The firm's refusal to disclose AUM or fund-vintage structure publicly further distinguishes it from most institutional VC managers of its vintage.

Yes, Latitude operates alongside the Latitude Foundation, a non-profit entity that funds open-source science education initiatives and small-satellite research grants (per the firm's official communications). The foundation is structurally separate from the investment management entity and does not hold portfolio-company equity.