Firm overview
Dash Fund is a pre-seed and seed-stage fund partnering with companies at their earliest stages across the fintech landscape. The fund’s general partners, Tom Seo and Ryan Sells, met when they were on opposite sides of the table: At the time, Tom was an investor with Citi Ventures and Ryan was head of business development for Second Measure, helping raise their Series A. They quickly saw an opportunity to partner together, and began angel investing before launching a proof-of-concept fund specifically focused on backing fintech founders at the earliest stages. Ryan and Tom concentrated on bringing a strong mix of operational and investing expertise to founders through their combined experiences at companies such as Second Measure, Clearco, Pipe, and Citi. They parlayed a successful proof-of-concept fund in 2020 to a significantly larger Fund II in 2021, which will double-down on their existing thesis.
Firm strategy
Dash Fund invests at the very earliest stages of company development and in fintech subsectors in their earliest stages of growth. Ryan and Tom bring a wealth of experience in fintech to the table, and they have continued to focus their investment strategy in areas where they see significant opportunities, including credit, APIs, consumer fintech, vertical SaaS, and other underpenetrated market categories. Ryan and Tom also take a collaborative approach to investing, focusing on being value additive coinvestors rather than leading rounds. From there, Tom and Ryan have established deep relationships with many leading investors for Series A and B rounds, putting their portfolio companies in advantageous positions to raise from quality early investors.
Why we invested
As a fintech company, we appreciated Dash Fund’s knowledge of the fintech ecosystem and the strong reputation they garnered not only with founders, but also with many leading Series A and B investors. We have already seen the reason why during the short time we’ve been an LP: Ryan and Tom take a proactive approach to engaging with and learning from the investment strategies of their LPs, and are diligent in surfacing relevant opportunities and trading notes about market activities. Ryan and Tom truly walk the walk when providing additional value to their founders and LPs, and we couldn’t be more excited to join them as they begin to build their brand in pre-seed and seed fintech investing.