Preface Ventures

Saad Siddiqui leads investment decisions as General Partner. He brings institutional venture experience from Titanium Ventures and corporate development roles at Informatica and Cisco, where he executed more than $7B in M&A transactions. The firm's lean structure means he is the primary decision-maker on new investments.

Preface invests at the absolute earliest stage. The firm states that 50% of the time it invests, the founding team has not yet opened a corporate bank account, and in 80% of cases Preface is the first institutional check. Initial checks range from $750k to $2M for pre-seed and seed rounds.

Preface can lead or participate. A distinctive part of its offering is syndicate construction — the firm offers to build the seed syndicate for founders by introducing a limited number of highly qualified venture partners. It maintains follow-on reserves of 1–3x initial investment for later rounds.

The firm is focused on enterprise infrastructure and software, with particular conviction in vertical SaaS and data network effects. Portfolio exposure through prior and current investments includes cybersecurity (CrowdStrike), identity and developer tools (Auth0, GitLab), and field-service vertical software (BuildOps).

Yes, Preface runs a structured 100-day post-investment program focused on building financial and board-reporting infrastructure. Separately, it commits to facilitating at least four net-new customer introductions — focused on Fortune 500 buyers — in the first year. The firm also provides targeted talent-introduction support for key hires.

Luke Cooper is Operating Partner, bringing venture experience from his prior role as General Partner at Latimer Ventures, as well as a background as a serial entrepreneur and board member at the University of Maryland Baltimore. Julie Arndorfer leads executive engagement and maintains a 300-plus-member community of enterprise CISOs and CIOs.

Preface operates as a formal venture capital fund but deliberately functions with a high-touch, concentrated portfolio model similar to a curated syndicate. It writes initial checks from an institutional pool, not deal-by-deal SPVs, then actively shapes the surrounding investor syndicate for each portfolio company.