How We Invest
Most infrastructure companies are built by engineers solving problems they personally encountered. The funding decision they make earliest — who writes the first check, and what that person understands about the problem — shapes everything that follows.
Akave is three partners who spent a combined twenty-five years as infrastructure engineers and operators before becoming investors. We write checks at pre-seed and seed because that's where our judgment has the most leverage. By Series A, the hard technical questions are answered. Before that is where we can help most.
What We Look For
The most durable infrastructure companies solve problems at the layer below the application — storage, compute, routing, observability. Problems that become more expensive to solve as the stack above them matures. We look for founders who are one layer below where everyone else is looking.
The best cloud infrastructure companies grow bottom-up: one developer discovers the tool, builds something real with it, advocates for it internally. We've led growth motions at companies that scaled this way. We know what the early signal looks like before it shows up in ARR.
Infrastructure companies built by people who ran the systems they're replacing tend to make different trade-offs than those built by people who only observed them. We can tell the difference. Background in distributed systems, infrastructure engineering, or developer platform operations matters.
Investment Parameters
We lead or co-lead pre-seed and seed rounds. Our checks range from $500K to $5M at entry. We follow with reserves for our best-performing portfolio companies through Series A and B.
Working with Founders
01
We engage on technical architecture decisions that have long-term business consequences — data model choices, API surface design, infrastructure cost structure. These are the decisions founders tend to make too fast and too early.
02
Getting early developer adoption has a specific motion: community presence, documentation quality, integration patterns, open-source strategy. Lauren has run this at scale. We bring that to companies pre-Series A.
03
Cloud-native companies often discover their unit economics too late. We help founders build cost models at the architecture design stage, before the pattern is locked in.
04
We've seen enough data-plane and developer-tools companies reach Series A to know what institutional growth investors look for. We prepare founders for that process 12-18 months in advance.
We respond to every email. Deck optional.
Send a pitch to [email protected]580 California Street, Suite 1200 · San Francisco, CA 94104