November 2025
A New Blueprint for Pre-Seed: From Tulsa to Boston
Over the last two months, the Visible Hands team has been on the ground in Tulsa and Boston, concluding Blueprint: Tulsa and launching our VHBOS fellowship. These programs are not roadshows or marketing exercises. They are core infrastructure for how we invest, how we build conviction, and how we support founders at the most formative stages of company creation.They represent our thesis in motion.
Why We Run Programs as a Fund
Fund II enables us to invest year-round and write ~$500k checks to exceptional founders. But we believe early-stage investing should go beyond capital deployment. True pre-seed investing requires structured discovery, community building, and deep founder diligence.Programs are how we:
Attract exceptional and often overlooked founders into our orbit
Build trust by delivering value before capital
Organize high-quality deal flow at scale
Evaluate founders based on behaviors, not just decks and pitch charisma
The question is not “Why run programs?” The question is: why would a pre-seed investor not want to see founders in motion before making long-term, high-conviction bets?Program participants receive non-dilutive grants, and we have the right of first access if we decide to make a dilutive investment.Our average NPS is 92. Founders feel the difference.
Experiential Diligence: Our Competitive Advantage
Pre-seed is ultimately a bet on people. Early-stage founders rarely have metrics that matter. But they do have signals:
How they adapt to feedback
How they communicate under pressure
How they assemble talent around them
How they navigate ambiguity and constraints
How they build conviction and velocity over time
These are not traits revealed in a 60-minute pitch meeting. They are observed over weeks and months of real work.Programs create a structured window into founder behaviors. It is diligence, but lived, not inspected. It gives us a clarity most pre-seed funds do not have the infrastructure to access.
Why This Matters for Venture
Most pre-seed funds operate with thin management fees. It creates a paradox: the earliest stage, where founders need the most support, has the fewest resources.Large firms have already shown the power of platform models at later stages. a16s has speedrun. Sequoia has Arc. First Round has PMF bootcamps. Research confirms that funds with real platform capabilities outperform.
The biggest gap is at pre-seed. We are filling it.
Blueprint: Accelerating the South
Blueprint focuses on the South, a geography where entrepreneurial ambition is rising faster than capital access. We selected 20 founders across the region and supported them from inspiration to build — what we define as -1 to 0.We draw best practices from models like Afore's Founder-in-Residence program (read about their philosophy behind Pre-Seed 2.0) and South Park Commons, which has helped catalyze innovators who later built transformational companies.According to South Park Commons as they announced their latest fund:“Our focus on -1 to 0 is working. SPC Fund I is in the top 5% of its vintage. Fund II is surpassing Fund I.”Their results validate an important truth: talent needs structured space and community before company formation, not after.Blueprint is our version tailored to rising entrepreneurial ecosystems.
VHBOS: Powering Boston’s Next Wave
In Boston, we launched a fellowship supporting 15 founders building from 0 to 1, many with early revenue and deep technical insight. The Boston founder DNA — research-driven, product-oriented, globally ambitious — remains an underpriced advantage in venture.
Daniela Campillo (Femmli) is pioneering continuous hormone monitoring, shifting women’s health from reactive care to proactive, personalized biological insight.
Rishabh Goel (Bond Health) is leveraging LLMs to dramatically improve clinical trial matching, expanding access and increasing diversity in research — critical to the future of equitable medicine.
Sophia Bender Koning (Hold My Juice) is reimagining the invisible labor of parenthood with an AI-powered assistant built for real family dynamics, not theoretical workflows.
What’s Next
We’re heading back to NYC next, with applications opening soon for our fourth cohort of VHNYC, our fourteen-week fellowship program in partnership with NYCEDC. This regional program will bring together 15 early-stage overlooked founders who are building across industries and backgrounds—but share one common goal: to turn promising startups into scalable, venture-ready companies.Building on the success of our Boston and Tulsa programs, VHNYC will deepen our presence in one of the world’s most dynamic startup ecosystems. Our focus will be on helping founders refine their business models, grow their customer bases, and position themselves for meaningful investment.
ECOSYSTEM: HuCapital Partnership
Last month, we partnered with HuCapital and sponsored their 2025 HuCapital Innovation Summit Pitch prize, to provide an innovation grant to an overlooked tech founder using AI to build in NYC. Our Chief of Staff/Investor, Monica Roman, participated in the competition as a judge, and we awarded the prize, as well as the final spot in our SEEN 50 cohort for 2025, to Nathalya Ramirez, pictured center.
PORTFOLIO HIGHLIGHT: Plot
PlotAs the first creative management platform for social media teams, Plot provides an AI-powered workspace for seamless ideation, planning, and collaboration across mobile and desktop.Company Highlights
Secured Funding: Raised a $3M seed round led by Seven Seven Six and Trust Fund at a $16M valuation, followed by a $1.1M seed extension led by Seven Seven Six and XYZ, increasing their valuation to $18M.
Product & Growth: Plot, a project management tool for creatives, introduced its AI video listening tool last year, helping secure enterprise clients.
Traction: Surpassed $600K ARR in under seven months.
Recognition: Ranked in the top 5 on Product Hunt during the launch of their AI video listening tool.
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