Why We Started Orbit AI

The partners at Orbit AI have collectively served as operators at companies ranging from growth-stage startups to publicly traded technology enterprises. Before becoming investors, we were the people making hire-or-not decisions, choosing between competing architectural approaches, and navigating the relentless ambiguity of early company building. We know what it feels like when a key engineer resigns the week before a major customer demo. We know the specific pain of watching a competitor outmaneuver you on pricing strategy. We have been in the room when the board loses faith and the company needs to find a new narrative.

That operational background is not a marketing point. It is the lens through which we evaluate every investment and the reason founders describe our support as categorically different from traditional institutional capital. When we help, we help with specificity -- not platitudes about "being aligned" or vague offers to "make introductions."

Our Investment Thesis

Orbit AI invests in early-stage companies where artificial intelligence is structurally embedded in the product -- not as a feature, but as the core mechanism that creates value and defensibility. We are not interested in companies that have bolted on a large language model to an otherwise conventional SaaS product. We are interested in companies where the AI capability is what makes the product possible in the first place.

We believe we are still in the infrastructure-building phase of the AI era. The dominant companies of the 2030s are being built today by teams who understand the technical architecture deeply, who have thought carefully about what data advantages they will accumulate, and who are targeting markets where their AI-native approach will produce products that are not merely better but fundamentally different from what incumbents can build.

Our focus areas are AI infrastructure and developer tooling, vertical AI applications in regulated industries, and human-machine collaboration platforms. Within each of these, we look for founding teams with genuine domain expertise, technical depth, and the operational instincts to navigate the difficult middle stages of company building.

Fund Structure and Investment Criteria

Orbit AI invests exclusively at the Seed stage. Our standard check size is $5M, with reserves for follow-on participation in subsequent rounds for companies performing above plan. We target ownership of 10 to 15 percent at entry and maintain a highly concentrated portfolio -- we typically make eight to twelve new investments per year, which means we have the capacity to be genuinely engaged with every company we back.

We do not have a strong preference for geography, though the majority of our portfolio is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and emerging startup ecosystems in the Southeast and Midwest. We look for at least two co-founders, because the Seed stage is hard enough with a partner; doing it alone is a risk factor we have learned to weight seriously.

What We Look for in Founders

We have backed founders from every conceivable background -- PhD researchers, former enterprise sales leaders, second-time founders, immigrant entrepreneurs, and people who built their first companies in their garages. Background matters less to us than what we call "founder pattern recognition": the ability to see a problem others have overlooked, the conviction to attack it against conventional wisdom, and the adaptability to change course when the evidence demands it.

We are particularly interested in founders who have lived the problem they are solving. Domain expertise combined with technical capability is the combination we find most compelling. When a healthcare technologist with ten years of clinical workflow experience builds an AI product for the operating room, they have answers to questions that a generalist entrepreneur would not think to ask for two years after founding.

We also look hard at technical co-founders. The companies we have seen succeed most consistently at the Seed stage are those with a founding team member who can build the core product without external dependencies. Outsourced development at the Seed stage is a red flag for us because it signals either a lack of technical capability or a lack of conviction about the product direction.