Who’s investing in seedstrapped businesses?

25 investors who are open to, or actively talking about, seedstrapping.

👋 Hi, it’s Zdenko and welcome to Seedstrapped, my newsletter about funding and building profitably growing SaaS businesses in the age of AI.

If you’re new here, start with some of the most-read issues:

• Seedstrapping: The Smarter Way to Fund Your Startup in 2025?

• Seedstrapping Success Stories: From $500k Raises to 8-Figure Exits

• Stop selling to everyone. Start building for someone

• You just raised $500k: what to do with it if you never want to raise again?

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One of the most common questions I get from founders exploring the seedstrapping path:

“Okay, I get the model. But who actually funds businesses this way?”

It’s a fair question. Traditional VCs are usually looking for unicorns - the 100x moonshots. That means most of them are out of this game.

With seedstrapping, the idea is that you raise once, with the goal of reaching profitability - not the next round.

That means you need investors who:

• are ok with 2x - 5x return coming from both growth and cash flow

• value profitable growth and dividends (or secondaries)

• don’t need every bet to turn into a unicorn

• do smaller checks (€100k–€1m)

So who are these investors?

The people funding seedstrapped businesses most often fall into three groups:

1. Angels & operators (often ex-founders) - individuals who’ve built and/or exited companies themselves and now back others taking a similar path

2. Micro / alternative funds - smaller, nimble funds (often <$50m) that tend to write early checks, move fast and stay hands-on.

3. Family offices - patient capital with more flexibility than institutional VC. Many family offices now actively invest in early-stage companies, preferring sustainable growth and dividends over forced exits.

Seedstrap-friendly Investors

Here's a first stab at seedstrap-friendly investors directory, which will hopefully be growing over time:

• Bloomberg Beta

• Buyback Ventures

• Calm Company Fund

• Champion Venture Partners

• Costanoa Ventures

• Earthling VC

• Flybridge Capital Partners

• Flying Founders

• Forum Ventures

• Homebrew

• Hustle Fund

• INDIE

• OpenSky Ventures

• Outlaw VC

• Recursive Ventures

• The Pitch Fund

• Tin Men Capital

• TinySeed

👉 Important caveat: there’s no such thing as a purely dedicated “seedstrap fund.” All of the funds and people in this list are investors who openly back seedstrapped businesses or write about seedstrapping - they're not exclusively dedicated to it.

What matters really is that there is capital out there for founders who don’t want to play the endless VC fundraising game. You just need to know where to look.

For now the most efficient approach is to search "seedstrapping" posts on platforms like Linkedin or X, no dedicated database exists.

I’ll be publishing a more expanded version of this directory with links to investor profiles, articles and interviews on Substack.

Over to you

This list is far from complete. If you know any other seedstrap-friendly investors that are not on the list tag them in the comments or DM me with details.

Cheers!

Zdenko

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Next up

In the next edition, I’ll flip the perspective: looking at founders who’ve actually gone through seedstrapping, their stories, and how they found the kind of capital that supports profitability over perpetual fundraising.