Private venture capital$10M or $10BEst. MMXXI
Capital for founders whose minds work differently.
a10 is a small, private firm. Each fund makes ten investments — at ten million dollars, or at ten billion. Nothing between. We back neurodivergent founders, the engineers and scientists whose attention runs deeper than the field and who, increasingly, are the ones the future is being built around.
Approach
Built for uncommon minds.
By design, the firm is small. The work is private. The kind of founder we back is, by intention, rare.
- I.
Ten investments. Then we wait.
Each fund makes exactly ten investments. Concentration is the measure of conviction, not its constraint.
- II.
Ten million, or ten billion.
We write two check sizes only — $10,000,000 or $10,000,000,000. Nothing between. The first is for conviction. The second is for compounding inside it.
- III.
Wired for depth.
We back founders whose cognition is, by any honest measure, atypical — and who, increasingly, form the substrate of the modern economy. The minds that hold a problem longest are the ones the future hires first.
- IV.
Discretion as a default.
Most of what we do compounds in private — code reviews, technical recruiting, patient counsel. It is rare you will read about it.
Focus
Where depth compounds.
We invest where the technical surface is hardest and the moat is earned slowly — fields that reward the kind of attention that does not normalize, the kind of mind that does not get bored.
- 01
Applied AI
Vertical agents, evaluation, and the infrastructure that turns research into product. Built, increasingly, by founders who refuse to abstract away from the model itself.
- 02
Developer tools
Languages, runtimes, and the unfashionable primitives the next decade is built on — work that rewards the engineer who has never quite been able to leave it alone.
- 03
Data infrastructure
Storage, compute, and orchestration for teams operating at the frontier of scale. Slow ground, won by minds that do not lose interest when the surface stops being interesting.
- 04
Security
Identity, supply chain, and the quiet work of making software trustworthy by default. Won, often, by people who notice the patterns the rest of the room has filtered out.
From the firm
Notes, letters, and the occasional memo.
We write rarely, and only about the few things we cannot stop thinking about. The archive, like the portfolio, is concentrated by design.
On depth
The most durable software companies are not built by the most charismatic founders. They are built by the most patient ones.
Read essay
Contact
If your work occupies you completely, please write.
Brevity is welcome; depth is what we are listening for. A partner replies, in person, to every founder whose attention sounds like the work.