Untapped Capital

WHO WE ARE

Untapped Capital is launching a $10MM seed stage venture firm to fund startups founded by undernetworked founders. Today, there are an increasing number of seed VCs, most of them relying on referrals, inflating valuation for rounds led by well networked founders. We narrowly focus on investing in great founders on the fringes of the startup ecosystem. Two reasons: first, a more reasonable valuation for similarly great companies produces better ROI, and second, from an impact perspective, identifying great founders that might otherwise be overlooked is great for the ecosystem. We find these founders by optimizing the firm, operations, and CRM, for proactive outreach – we expect about 90% of our pipeline to be outbound. Uncovering great startups and building relationships with them is what Yohei Nakajima has specialized in through his time working at Techstars and Scrum Ventures, and with organizations such as The Walt Disney Company and Nintendo.

10,000,000

TARGET SIZE OF FUNDS

Sector

AI/ML, Business Intelligence, B2B

Stage

Pre-Seed, Seed

Region

North America

Countries

US

Founder(s)

Yohei Nakajima

Yohei Nakajima has been supporting early-stage startups for 15 years across a variety of stages from inception to growth. He currently works at Scrum Ventures, a Bay Area based seed and Series A fund where he sits on the investment team and leads their innovation consulting arm – which works with organizations such as Nintendo, Dentsu, and Panasonic. At Scrum, he led the investment in, and sits on the board of Misapplied Sciences, a Redmond based startup that took Keynote stage at CES this year alongside Delta. Prior to Scrum, Yohei helped spin up the Disney Accelerator at Techstars, before leading the Techstars-wide effort to include startup recruitment, working alongside 30+ investors on finding great startups.