SWAN Venture Fund

Managing member Peter Weiss leads the investment process, drawing on over forty years of finance and operational experience from Wall Street M&A through decades of CFO advisory work in the Pacific Northwest. Business Director Nate Doran oversees fund operations and daily management. The broader 70-person membership — all active angel investors — participates in sourcing, diligence, and post-investment company building.

SWAN's deal flow runs through the personal and professional networks of its 70 operator-angels in Seattle and the surrounding region. Because its members are former founders, operators, and technical executives, most companies reach the fund through direct relationships rather than broad inbound application. The firm does not disclose a dedicated outbound origination function, relying instead on the reach of its member base.

SWAN occupies a hybrid position: it forms a new blind-pool fund approximately every three years, each of which pools capital from 70 individual investors who are themselves active angels. The fund writes formal lead-sized pre-seed and seed checks, but its membership base operates in practice like an organized syndicate — the capital sits inside a fund vehicle, while the sourcing, diligence, and portfolio support function through individual angel networks.

SWAN explicitly describes itself as providing the first major outside investment, with initial checks ranging from $200,000 to $1.2 million. It does not publicly commit to specific pro-rata or follow-on reserve strategies. The firm's publicly available information does not outline a structured follow-on reserve allocation per company.

SWAN's public materials list four target areas — B2B software, market-accelerating technologies, capital-efficient hard-science (diagnostics, medical devices), and scalable hardware — which implicitly rule out consumer-focused internet startups, retail, and most service-based business models found outside the technical spaces the fund targets. SWAN does not publish a formal exclusions list.

SWAN's capital originates entirely from its 70 individual members, each an angel investor in the Pacific Northwest who joined the fund through a recruiting process tied to each three-year vehicle. The firm has not disclosed any institutional limited partners, family offices, or fund-of-funds on its cap table. The wealth of individual members is not disclosed.

SWAN states that it often leads early pre-seed and seed rounds, but it has not publicly outlined a formal co-investment policy or disclosed specific co-investment partners. The geographic focus and check size suggest coordination with other Seattle-area funds and angel networks, though no examples are publicly cited.