Cleo Capital raised a $3.5M scout fund specifically to back female investors who source and lead deals, with a scout network built from nontraditional channels like journalists and influencers rather than typical Sand Hill Road circles. The firm targets female founders at the "friend and family" gap—writing checks at the earliest stages for women who often lack wealthy personal networks—and in 2024 launched a fully remote cybersecurity accelerator backed directly by the VC fund to create a proprietary pipeline into security startups globally.
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Video Interview
On terms versus valuation
"Clean terms will save you almost from every personality problem... optimizing for a higher valuation instead of the best partner for you is a vanity thing."
Sarah Kunst | Cleo Capital
On why chasing warm intros can be a mistake
"The amount of time that people spend trying to find... warm intros thinking that that's their edge at the really early stage is so silly to me... it's much more of a shots on goal game. It's much more about getting a big top of funnel and seeing what comes through and casting a much wider net."
Sarah Kunst | Cleo Capital
On why she reads all inbound herself
"I literally have looked at over 10,000 pitches that I've gotten through CleoCap.com... and I'm not unique in that. A lot of investors do that."
Sarah Kunst | Cleo Capital
On how rarely she meets
"It is normal for me in a given week to read 300 pitches and not take a single meeting."
Sarah Kunst | Cleo Capital
On whether you should start a company at all
"If your only goal is to make money, then honestly you're probably better off playing the prediction markets... even those terrible odds are probably better than the odds of actually making money on a startup. So you really do have to love the process."
Sarah Kunst | Cleo Capital
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