Pure Ventures

Howie Diamond serves as Managing Director and General Partner, marking his third fund management role after Alpha Bridge Ventures and Ranch Ventures. Douglas Abrams operates as General Partner with a CPG and food-and-beverage focus, while Venture Partner Jake Chapman contributes deal flow from a decade-plus VC and legal background. Alicia Zeng, Director of Operations, rounds out the leadership team listed on the firm's website.

The firm combines Diamond and Chapman’s existing Silicon Valley networks — built across multiple prior funds — with Abrams’s deep CPG relationships, including board seats at Unagi Scooters, Elements, and Purity Organic. Its venture studio and fellowship program creates an additional proprietary pipeline at the pre-seed and seed stages, generating deal flow that may graduate into core post-seed and Series A allocations.

Pure Ventures functions primarily as an early-stage venture capital firm, making core investments at the post-seed and Series A stages. It also runs a venture studio and fellowship program for pre-seed and seed deals, but that activity feeds into the fund as a pipeline rather than representing the firm’s primary business model. The investment arm is distinct from Heartwood Collective, the firm’s founder wellness initiative.

The firm’s stated portfolio does not tag any explicit sector exclusions. Its public positioning is positive around consumer and CPG, frontier tech, deep tech, and space. Absence of B2B enterprise SaaS, biotech therapeutics, and hard industrial manufacturing among its listed positions suggests a bias toward consumer-facing and hardware-enabled startups.

Heartwood Collective operates as a sister program to the fund, not a portfolio company or a revenue-generating service line. Founded by Kari Sulenes in 2018, it provides leadership development and mental health coaching to founders within and beyond the Pure Ventures portfolio. The firm’s thesis — that founder health drives company performance — is operationalized through this dual structure.

All publicly listed positions on the firm’s website are direct equity investments in operating companies, from pre-seed to Series A. There is no mention of fund-of-funds commitments, LP positions in other venture firms, or secondary purchases. The firm appears to deploy exclusively through direct early-stage checks.

The firm’s website does not explicitly solicit or describe co-investment practices. Its portfolio does not name co-investors, and no fund structure or syndication patterns are disclosed. The presence of a venture studio and fellowship network suggests a preference for originating and leading rounds internally rather than participating passively in syndicates.