Announcing Our $12 Million Seed Round

We’re thrilled to announce a Seed round of $12 Million for Sweater, co-led by Motivate VC and Akuna Capital, with participation from Jeffrey Cruttenden (Co-founder of Acorns), Eli Broverman (Co-founder of Betterment), Liquidity Ventures, MRTNZ Ventures, Bison Venture Partners, Spacestation, First Chair Ventures, Zilliqa Capital, Monsen Ventures, Nick Perez, Jeb Bush Jr., Ryan Holtzman, Aaron Wolko, as well as YouTube creators Peter Hollens (2.6M subscribers), Andrei Jikh (1.9M subscribers),  Nate O’Brian (1.2M subscribers), and Jake Tran (924K subscribers), among other super angels.

This is a mega moment for us and the entire Sweater team. This is a mega moment for the investing space, for venture capital, for founders. It’s hard to wrap the significance of this occasion into one little announcement, but we’ll give it a try.

The Journey

A journey like this requires special people to see into the future and turn a vision into reality. We are incredibly grateful to our team that has taken the leap to build with us and to our investors for helping pave the path forward.

Sweater has been a journey for the better part of five years. It takes time to nurture a revolutionary idea, especially one that navigates mazes of financial regulations and locks horns with a century of tradition.

It’s worth pointing out that there are reasons why it has taken so long for real access to the private market to open up. It comes down to that old idiom: you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it.

Before, there was no reason for the system to change because not enough people had woken up to the inner-workings of the invitation-only private market and demanded it. And maybe some had, but didn’t know where to start. Things are finally changing.

We’re at the forefront of a retail investor revolution. More and more of our community—including historically underrepresented groups, such as women, BIPOC, younger investors, people of all trades and backgrounds—are seeking financial education and alternative investing opportunities previously reserved for a select few. It’s pretty amazing how far the retail investing space has come in the last few years with investing arenas in real estate, art, farmland and other forms of private equity exploding into the market.

The venture capital space was begging for change. The majority of investors—even founders, analysts, and venture insiders—couldn’t meet the requirements for most of the existing paths into venture investing, so we decided to reshape the landscape for everyone, for you.

So here we are to give everyone a seat at the table, and heck, build a new table while we’re at it.

The Seat & The Table

There’s something to be said about a venture-backed company revolutionizing the venture capital world. We believe in the venture capital ecosystem. It isn’t broken. It’s just too exclusive.

Our mission at Sweater is to accelerate generational wealth creation for all people through venture investing. We truly believe venture investing can shape the world, and we want to open that opportunity to everyone.

But it’s not just about opening access for everyday people to invest in VC. We believe that the venture space as a whole will benefit from more democratization. By bringing investors, founders, and the companies they’re building closer together, we can move venture forward into a more equitable, inclusive space. We believe we can do this by sewing a tight-knit, welcoming community that creates more opportunities for founders to engage with their investors in meaningful ways.

So What’s Next

We are in the final stretch of preparing the Sweater app for launch, and we’ll begin inviting folks from the waitlist to download the app and become Members in the coming months.

We plan to use the capital from this raise to scale across the entire organization. We’ve already added some key stitches to the Sweater team to lead various areas of the company.

• We’re continuing to build out a world-class investment team to give us the best opportunity to hit our goals for the fund. This includes growing both our venture team and deal team, including our Scout Network.

• We’re expanding our growth marketing efforts to spread awareness of our mission and grow the Sweater community because it’s all of you—founders, investors, scouts, partners—who are integral to Sweater’s success both as a fund and leading change in the venture industry.

• We’re building out our Member experience team to deliver faithful stewardship of our Members and their investments, focusing on transparency, education and community.

• And of course, we’re growing our product and engineering team to bring a premier mobile-first investing experience.

Changing the status quo of venture requires a lot of smart people aligned under a single mission and supported by a tight-knit community of investors, founders and key partners.

Thank you for your belief in us and our mission. Let’s do this knit!

See you at the table,

JCM
Jesse, Chad, Matthew

P.S. If you haven’t yet, join the waitlist to learn more about the first VC fund for everyone.

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