Ulu Ventures

Co-founders Miriam Rivera and Clint Korver serve as managing directors and make all investment decisions jointly. Both bring operator and academic backgrounds — Rivera was an early Google executive and practicing attorney; Korver is a Stanford-trained engineer who co-authored a textbook on decision analysis. Neither partner delegates final investment authority to junior team members.

Ulu sources through the Stanford ecosystem — where both partners teach — and through a network of diverse founders and operators. The firm's consistent diversity metrics suggest sourcing from networks that traditional venture firms often overlook. Rivera's legal career and Google tenure provide access to technical founders, while Korver's decision-analysis community surfaces deals from engineering and data-science circles.

Ulu reserves capital for follow-on investments into portfolio companies that meet the fund's scoring threshold across subsequent rounds. The firm typically writes initial checks of $500K–$2M and may maintain pro-rata participation in later financings. The structured decision framework is re-applied at each funding event, creating a consistent evaluation trail across a company's lifecycle.

Ulu targets pre-seed and seed-stage rounds, with selectivity toward companies that have a product prototype or early customer validation. The fund rarely leads rounds below the seed level and will sometimes co-invest alongside larger multi-stage firms when the valuation and round structure aligns with the fund's ownership targets.

Ulu requires every partner to independently score each investment on a defined set of criteria before discussion — a technique adapted from academic decision-analysis literature designed to reduce anchoring bias. The scores are aggregated and debated, with the final decision recorded against the original scoring. The result is a fully documented investment rationale for every portfolio company, win or lose.

Ulu operates a single core fund family — Ulu Ventures Fund I through IV — without parallel opportunity funds or annex vehicles. The firm has not publicly announced a growth-stage or opportunity fund, concentrating all deployment into the seed-stage strategy.

Ulu reports that its portfolio includes a higher-than-industry-average proportion of women and minority founders, which the firm attributes to its structured decision process rather than a mandate-driven strategy. The scoring framework explicitly separates founder demographics from the evaluation criteria, with the firm arguing that de-biasing the process produces a more representative portfolio as a mathematical byproduct.