Lobby Capital

David Hornik, Eric Carlborg and Buddy Arnheim are the three founding general partners and the sole investment committee. Lobby operates without junior investment professionals, so every funding decision and board interaction involves at least one — and often all three — named partners. Hornik is the most publicly visible, having led August Capital's investments in Splunk, Fastly and GitLab before the 2020 spinout.

Lobby operates a single venture fund strategy, raising funds on a sequential basis rather than spinning out sector-specific or stage-specific vehicles. Its initial 2020 fund and the follow-on vehicle closed in October 2023 follow the same mandate: concentrated early-stage enterprise-technology investing led by the same three general partners.

Lobby focuses on seed and Series A rounds, generally writing initial checks between $2 million and $8 million. The firm reserves significant follow-on capital to maintain pro-rata positions through later rounds, a posture that signals its intent to remain an active board participant as companies scale rather than passively tagging along.

Hornik spent 20 years at August Capital, while Carlborg and Arnheim each spent over a decade there, co-investing and managing LP relationships throughout that tenure. When they launched Lobby in 2020, August Capital's existing limited partners provided the anchor commitments for Fund I — a continuity rare enough that TechCrunch covered the transition explicitly at the time (per TechCrunch, 2020).

Lobby invests solely through direct equity investments in early-stage companies. There is no fund-of-funds allocation, SPV platform or secondaries program. Its entire deployment is captured in the 30-plus portfolio companies it has backed since 2020, plus follow-on reserves held for pro-rata maintenance.

Lobby is an enterprise-technology specialist. Its portfolio concentrates on enterprise SaaS, AI-native infrastructure, cybersecurity, developer tooling and data-platform companies. The firm has publicly confirmed positions in Hex Technologies (collaborative data science), Mux (video infrastructure) and Descope (authentication), all of which sit within those enterprise-technology verticals.

Board participation is Lobby's defining structural feature. All three general partners sit on every portfolio company's board — either as a full director or as a board observer — which embeds the entire partnership into the governance of each investment. This is a deliberate departure from the scaled-venture model where one partner covers 8 to 12 boards alone.