Sandalphon Capital

Jonathan Ellis is the Founder and General Partner and makes the investment decisions. He previously sourced and executed private investments at Macquarie’s Principal Finance Group and was an active angel investor before establishing the firm in 2016. Nevin Ramanujan is a Partner focused on healthcare IT and tech-enabled services, a mandate he built from his corporate development role at Elevance Health where he worked on acquisitions including Aspire Health and Beacon Health Options.

Sandalphon relies heavily on its deep Chicago and Midwest network, supplemented by its annual midwest.tech/connect virtual summit, which matches pre-seed to Series A startups with venture and angel investors. The firm’s LPs also bring domain expertise and referral networks across fintech, insurtech, proptech, and healthcare, creating an origination funnel outside the coastal venture hubs.

Sandalphon is a venture capital firm, not a single family office. It was founded by Jonathan Ellis as an institutional early-stage manager and raises capital from limited partners who can also co-invest alongside the fund in portfolio rounds.

Sandalphon writes its own fund check — typically $100k to $2m depending on stage — and then gives its LPs the option to invest additional capital into the same round on a deal-by-deal basis. This allows total round participation to exceed the stated check size without requiring a separate institutional close, a structure Ellis formalized after his earlier angel syndicate experience.

The firm explicitly states it does not invest in crypto, life sciences, biotech, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, or advanced materials. Its focus is strictly on digital-transformation software — B2B SaaS, marketplaces, and tech-enabled services — in fintech, insurtech, proptech, digital health, and govtech.

No. Sandalphon explicitly states it typically does not invest in the Bay Area and instead concentrates on Chicago, the Midwest, and other geographies it considers underserved by venture capital.

Sandalphon hosts midwest.tech/connect, a recurring virtual summit that connects pre-seed to Series A startups based in or linked to the Midwest with venture capital and angel investors. It functions as both a sourcing channel for the firm and a market-making event for the regional ecosystem.