Yes VC

Caterina Fake is the founder and the central investment decision-maker. The firm’s website lists five other team members — Jyri Engeström, Julie Liao, Markus Räikkönen, Beth Malin, and David Pickerell — but does not specify their titles or formal investment committee roles. In practice, Yes VC operates with the concentrated authority typical of a founder-led venture firm, where Fake’s operator background and personal network drive sourcing and conviction.

Yes VC invests exclusively at the Pre-Seed and Seed stages. The firm explicitly states it backs 'category-defining companies' at the earliest point of formation, and its portfolio reflects this: companies such as Heirloom, Steady Energy, and Boom Supersonic were backed when their technologies were still in development, not at commercial scale.

The firm’s website does not specify whether it leads financings. Given Yes VC’s small deal cadence — roughly 10 investments per year — and its focus on pre-seed and seed stages, the firm likely writes initial checks but its capacity to anchor a round without external syndication partners depends on check size, which the firm does not publicly disclose.

Yes VC maintains a deliberately broad mandate that spans software, consumer brands, and deep technology. The portfolio includes direct air capture developer Heirloom, small nuclear reactor company Steady Energy, supersonic aircraft manufacturer Boom Supersonic, and electric propulsion firm Tau, all of which require heavy capital-expenditure profiles uncommon in typical software-focused seed funds.

The firm invests in, on average, 10 companies per year, a figure it discloses on its portfolio page. This cadence has remained steady across multiple years and supports the thesis that Yes VC is not scaling aggressively: it is making fewer than one new investment per month, enabling diligence in technically complex categories such as aviation, nuclear energy, and synthetic biology.

Caterina Fake co-founded Flickr and was a key figure in the early social web. Yes VC is her dedicated venture investment entity, separate from those operating companies. There is no public indication that the firm is capitalized by assets from the sale of Flickr or other prior ventures; its capital base is not disclosed.

Yes VC does not disclose its limited partners, and no public filings or press reports identify institutional backers. This opacity is consistent with a firm that operates more like a single-family or founder-capital vehicle — making concentrated early-stage bets without the reporting obligations of a traditional institutional venture fund.