Pre-seed and seed
Pre-seed and seed checks for teams building infrastructure and vertical software.
For founders →Thesis
Most institutional money arrives after a category is named. By the time “devtools” or “healthcare infrastructure” becomes a line in a deck, the pricing, the terms, and often the best founders have already been claimed. Northbridge exists to be on the other side of that moment — writing checks when a company looks like a small team with an unfair insight, not a category leader in waiting.
We invest in two places where that insight tends to hide: infrastructure, where the buyer is an engineer who cannot be sold a story, and vertical software, where the buyer is an operator whose workflow nobody outside the industry understands. In both cases we want founders who have already done the hard part — found the customers who feel the problem most acutely — before they have raised anything meaningful.
We are not generalists. If a company does not sell software into a workflow where switching costs compound, it is probably not for us, and we will say so in the first meeting rather than the fourth.
Seed · 2022
Arcline Freight came to us with a working prototype and eleven phone interviews with regional fleet owners. No revenue, no demo day, no warm intro. We wrote the seed check because the founders had already done the unglamorous work of sitting in dispatch offices.
Seed · 2021
Cadence Systems was founded by a former payments infrastructure engineer who had spent four years watching mid-market finance teams reconcile bank data by hand. She had three design partners before she had a company. We led her seed round in 2021.
Seed · 2022
Tessera Health was two nurse practitioners and a contract engineer building prior-authorization software for the clinics they had worked in. Their first fifteen customers came from their own professional network. That is the pattern we look for: distribution insight that predates the company.
For founders
01
$400K–$900K
Pre-seed
$1M–$2.5M
Seed
We aim for 10–15% ownership and reserve heavily for follow-ons — roughly 60% of our capital goes to companies we already own.
02
First meeting to term sheet in under three weeks. Every process starts with a working session on your product, not a pitch. Partners do their own diligence; we do not outsource technical evaluation.
03
We help close your first three engineering hires, run your Series A process when the time comes, and make introductions from a contact list built from operating years, not conference floors.
The fastest path in is a cold email to partners@northbridge.vc with a Loom of your product and one paragraph on who your first ten customers are. We read everything.
Portfolio
Hover any name for the current state of the company. We keep this list updated the week a round closes or a company shuts down.
Bold marks a company that’s since raised a further round.
Harborline
Pre-seed, 2023 — since closed a $6M seed; customs filing software for freight forwarders
Ferrotype
Pre-seed, 2024 — seed closed in early 2025; type-safe data pipelines for ML teams
Sableworks
Pre-seed, 2025 — first revenue quarter ahead of schedule; quoting software for fabricators
Kestrel Grid
Pre-seed, 2025 — three signed design partners; load forecasting for municipal utilities
Cadence Systems
Seed, 2021 — since raised Series C; treasury infrastructure for mid-market finance teams
Meridian Ledger
Seed, 2021 — now profitable with 40 employees; compliance automation for credit unions
Arcline Freight
Seed, 2022 — since raised Series B; dispatch software for regional trucking fleets
Tessera Health
Seed, 2022 — since raised Series A; prior-auth infrastructure for specialty clinics
Quarry Labs
Seed, 2023 — since raised Series B; storage engines for regulated workloads
Basalt Security
Seed, 2024 — since raised Series A; secrets management for platform teams
Partners
General Partner since 2020
Nine investments led, including Cadence Systems and Basalt Security
Spent six years at Datadog leading the developer-platform product line through its growth from 40 to 900 engineers. Before that, founding engineer at Segment from seed through the Twilio acquisition in 2020. Has led nine Northbridge investments, including Cadence Systems and Basalt Security.
General Partner since 2021
Led the Arcline Freight and Quarry Labs investments
Five years investing in infrastructure at Bessemer Venture Partners, where he authored two editions of the firm’s state-of-devtools report. Before investing, product lead at Samsara from its Series C through IPO in 2021. Led Northbridge’s investments in Arcline Freight and Quarry Labs.
Principal since 2023
Led the Tessera Health and Harborline investments
Built Chartwise, a clinical documentation tool for nurse practitioners, from first customer to acquisition by athenahealth in 2022. Practiced as an RN in acute care for four years before that. Joined Northbridge in 2023 and led the Tessera Health and Harborline investments.
For limited partners
$120M
2023 vintage
32
companies targeted across pre-seed and seed
Year 3 of 10
Quarterly letters with company-level marks and write-downs stated plainly. No smoothed TVPI narratives.
Annual LP meeting each September in San Francisco, plus an open diligence session with any portfolio founder on request.
Diligence materials for Fund II are available on request at lp@northbridge.vc.