Partner Funds
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History was made this week when the Sweater Cashmere Fund was officially declared effective by the SEC—the first public venture capital fund open to accredited and non-accredited investors. Yes, we did it, and venture capital will never be the same.
Maybe it sounds like we’re speaking with a bit of hyperbole. We’re no doubt excited and feeling triumphant both as individuals and a team, seeing many, many hours of hard work come to fruition.
Here we are after 4 years of demanding access and forging a way to open VC to everyone. A lot of people said it couldn’t be done, and there were certainly moments where we felt the same, but we dug in even more. And the result is this—the Cashmere Fund.
The Cashmere Fund is our first fund—our flagship fund. In the future, we will open other funds to provide more options to investors looking to access the VC asset class and make an impact in other venture verticals. But that’s a topic for another time.
While we grow the Cashmere Fund’s portfolio, our investment team is focusing primarily on early-stage startups that are consumer-touching, which ends up casting a very wide net. These will be investments into consumer products, marketplace technologies, and software you use at work. We’ll additionally make investments into later stage series B companies all the way through pre-IPO secondaries as well as emerging fund managers as part of a fully diversified venture strategy.
The logic behind a consumer-touching strategy for our first fund is directly tied to the foundation of what we’re building at Sweater—community. Products and technologies that are consumer-touching change the way we live, and the vision at Sweater is to build a community where founders and investors can engage with each other in more meaningful ways. This means founders can gain substantial insights from Sweater Members, helping them build and scale, and Members can directly impact the companies they’re invested in through Sweater—companies transforming their lives.
We can start taking investments, and we’re excited to open the fund to everyone on our waitlist. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be sending them invite codes when it’s their turn to download the app and invest ahead of our public launch. And anyone who invests during this early-access period joins Sweater as a “Founding Member,” which will come with awesome community benefits in the future.
The waitlist will remain open until our public launch for anyone who wants the opportunity to join Sweater as a Founding Member.
Then, as Members make investments into the fund, our investment team will start deploying that capital into early-stage startups they’ve identified and conducted due diligence on. We’ve got some exciting deal flow already in due diligence.
Now we can really start shaping the future through venture capital with our tight-knit community of Sweater Members and founders. And the more people invested in Sweater, the greater impact we can achieve together.
Cheers!
JCM
Jesse, Chad, Matthew
