Very Early Ventures

Founding partners Mathieu Chanson and Jan Baeriswyl lead the firm. Both hold PhDs in computer science, and investment decisions appear to rest with the two of them given the firm's compact partnership structure. No other investment committee members or senior investment professionals have been publicly identified.

The firm concentrates on the earliest stages of company formation — pre-seed and seed rounds. The name itself signals the mandate. It structures its capital through dedicated early-stage vehicle series (very early Ventures I and II) rather than through a single evergreen pool, implying a fund-cycle rhythm typical of managers deploying into rounds where product-market fit is unproven.

It operates as an asset manager raising closed-end venture funds, not as a single-family office or permanent capital vehicle. The Cayman Islands domicile and sequential fund numbering (I, II) are consistent with a traditional blind-pool venture capital structure rather than a family office deploying proprietary wealth.

The firm is registered in the Cayman Islands, but the founders' professional roots are in the Swiss technology and fintech ecosystem. Both are members of the Swiss FinTech Association and SECA, which positions the firm to source heavily from Switzerland and broader continental Europe. No explicit geographic mandate has been disclosed publicly.

Founding partner Mathieu Chanson serves as a multisig member for the Stabila proposal on Celo, a mobile-first blockchain platform. This role is a direct operational involvement in decentralized protocol governance rather than a passive portfolio investment, indicating the firm's principals engage at the infrastructure layer of the crypto ecosystem they invest in.

Both general partners hold PhDs in computer science — an unusual credential set in venture capital, where many investors come from finance or operating backgrounds. This allows Very Early Ventures to conduct technical diligence on architectures and codebases without outsourcing that evaluation, a meaningful advantage when investing at stages where the product may not yet exist and founder technical capability is the primary underwriting variable.

No. The firm has not published AUM, fund sizes, or aggregate deployment figures. The existence of at least two vehicles (very early Ventures I and II) suggests a multi-fund track record, but allocators should source sizing data directly from the firm or through confidential data-room access.