Anorak Ventures: Partner Meeting 2025

On November 5th we held our 9th annual LP event on the 42nd floor of One Sansome street in San Francisco. The firm brought together the most impressive collection of leaders, LPs and co-investors to celebrate the amazing work of our founders. Robots, Drones, 3D reconstruction, Health monitoring, Lab automation, Personal electronics and Mission simulation - our founders gave attendees a real insight into a better future for the US, its allies and the world.

Across three hours of conversations, keynotes, founder stories and one of our liveliest mixers yet, we explored a central theme: we are entering a new technological revolution, and the founders building at the edge are driving it.

Founder Spotlights: Building the Future in Real Time

Our lineup of founders this year spanned a number of critical sectors showing why DeepTech has moved from niche to necessary.

Brendan Iribe — Sesame

Fresh off the company’s exceptional early momentum, Brendan shared how Sesame is reimagining the feel of personal computing. His conversation with Greg touched on what it takes to sh ip products that feel magical, not just functional - magical demo included.

Brendan Iribe (Sesame) fireside chat with Greg Castle (Anorak Ventures)

Ula Rustamova — Level Zero Health

Ula took the audience through the very earliest days of founding Level Zero and the challenges of innovating across the lab, clinical grade hardware and software. Her fireside chat made clear that the future of healthcare will be driven as much by data and automation as by clinical expertise.

Keith Miao — Birdstop

Keith walked us through the evolution of autonomous sensing and the realities of deploying hardware intelligence in the field. Keith explained the thinking behind moving the company to Detroit, drones as first responders and the protection of critical infrastructure.

GP Greg Castle in conversation with Keith Miao (Birdstop)

Silas Adekunle — Reach Industries

After receiving a term sheet for Reach's latest round the morning of the event, Silas presented Lumi, the first visual AI Copilot for science. The company is building for an automated future and started with the most fundamental space for human innovation - science and the lab.

Jonathan Pan — Exia Labs

Jonathan gave a masterclass in explaining the potential of gaming technology when applied to mission planning and decision making in defense. Having partnered with multiple brigades, Jonathan showed how Exia builds world models to ensure better decision making using spatial reasoning on critical missions.

James Brown — Schemata

James showed how his team are creating virtual training and simulation through Schemata's creation of interactable 3D digital assets of real-world objects and environments. James gave a glimpse into the future of full 3D scene understanding and how it can be used across both the defense sector and enterprise.

Nirav Patel — Framework

Closing out the founder sessions, Nirav discussed the resurgence of American manufacturing and what it takes to build modular consumer hardware that users genuinely love. A highlight was Nirav's ambition to have consumers 'Outraged' at other consumer electronics brands who cannot offer them a device that works for them and actually lasts.

A Look Back at an Extraordinary Year

Charlie's reflection's after 1 year at the firm starting with showing just how rapidly the landscape is shifting. Silicon Valley’s historical innovation cycles—semiconductors, personal computing, the internet, social—are giving way to a broader revolution in industrial technology, reindustrialization, and AI-native hardware.

His rumination on the history of industrial revolution highlights what makes this moment so special: the chance to partner with founders using deep technology to solve real-world, physical problems across key infrastructure in healthcare, robotics, materials, manufacturing, sensing, and more.

The Anorak DeepTech Matrix

The results speak for themselves. In his first year alone, the team has backed teams building world-class breakthroughs across the Anorak “sweet spots” - commercializing novel technology and creating industry-shifting applications.

Anorak's Performance

Greg closed the day with an overview of fund performance from Funds I and II as well as early Fund III portfolio highlights from our first nine investments. A particular highlight was announcing 2 new unicorns in the portfolio in Sesame and Onebrief. We finished up the event with 100 people attending our evening event at the Amador Club. Guests included investors from almost every major firm and inspiring founders and operators in our network.

Drones at the Amador Club

Till next year...

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A massive thank you to our sponsors and continued support from, UBS, Perlson and VentureBest. To all the founders and friends who presented, we thank you for your time. We feel lucky every day to be supported by such a strong community and are incredibly excited to continue our work backing those building the future.

Anorak Ventures: Partner Meeting 2024

On October 10th, we hosted our annual partner meeting at Shack 15 in San Francisco’s iconic ferry building. The afternoon was attended by an amazing group of investors and founders who presented on topics including Robotics, AI, AR/VR, Material science, extraterrestrial communications, and early-stage investing. We were also treated to an airshow provided by the Blue Angels!

GP Greg Castle in conversation with Brad Bogolea (Simbe Robotics)

Key takeaways from our State of Venture presentation include:

• The S&P500 is having a strong year (+23%), driven mainly by large-cap equities, while small-cap equities are lagging behind (+7%). Lower public multiples and political and economic uncertainty have kept the IPO market stunted for technology companies.

  

  Anorak's State of Venture Keynote

• With IPO and M&A activity low, liquidity for LPs has suffered, resulting in less capital available to be reinvested into the venture asset class.

• LPs are increasingly favoring experienced fund managers and fewer funds are increasing in fund size YoY.

• VCs with capital to deploy have more investment options and greater leverage when negotiating terms. It’s an investor friendly market for those with capital to deploy.

We heard from a selection of incredible founders and friends of the fund:

We learnt about the latest developments in Ai from Jake, how robots are changing the face of retail from Brad, efficient military planning from Grant, building gaming communities from Jack, material advancements from Derek, transmission of video from space with Nicolaas, as well as the incredible story of building and selling OpenGov for $1.8B from Zach. Finally, Alice Bentinck, the CEO of Entrepreneur First sat down with Charlie to discuss Non-American Dynamism and why she has recently moved the launch phase of her accelerator to San Francisco.

Non-American Dynamism with Alice Bentinck, CEO and Co-Founder of EF

We covered Anorak’s fund performance, provided an update on our thesis, and gave a first look at our plans for Fund III:

• Flock Safety, Anduril, Rec Room remain the core return drivers of Fund I. Onebrief and Simbe recently closed massive funding rounds and show great promise of pushing TVPI well beyond 5x.

• Fund II is still early, but Framework, Gridware, Trass Games, Sesame, and Polimorphic are showing early signs of breakout success. We’re targeting the same 5x TVPI.

• We consistently see authentic, mission-driven founders have better results in raising, hiring, and growing their businesses. The patriotic movement to ensure the US and our allies remain strong and resilient is a timely mission we will continue supporting through Fund III.

• Our top-performing founders come through trusted referrals. As our network of investors and successful founders continues to grow, we will develop systems to accelerate and encourage these valuable referrals.

• Over 160 people attended our evening event, including investors from almost every major firm and inspiring founders in our network.

SF Tech Week - Anorak Ventures DeepTech Mixer

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A massive thank you to our sponsors, UBS, Steifel, Perlson, VentureBest, and Orrick. To all the founders and friends who presented, we thank you for your time. We feel lucky every day to be supported by such a strong community and are incredibly excited to continue our work with Fund III.

Welcoming Charlie Leggate to the team

I'm very excited to share that I have joined Anorak Ventures, an early-stage emerging technologies fund. Our aim is to be the partner for seed-stage deep tech founders whose companies have a clear vision of how to push humanity forward.

“Vision” is an intentional word here. In building a business, it’s everything. I’ve been lucky to learn something about that over the last near-decade across strategy, product management, and most recently founding Avie AI. 

At the DeepTech accelerator Entrepreneur First in London, where I started Avie, founding teams learned a mantra: “Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held.” That’s Alice Bentinck’s and Matt Clifford’s abstraction of how to never lose sight of your vision, while remaining adaptable enough on how to get there. We were regularly pushed to present our visions for the company we were building. It was clear, very early on, which companies were going to raise the money they needed, hire the team members they wanted, and sell to their target customers. Those companies had the most ambitious and clearest visions.

Perhaps surprisingly, the hardest businesses to build are often those with the greatest visions. Technical founders building frontier technologies in robotics, AI, VR/AR, and deep learning usually find it easier to envision how the world might be in a decade compared to an MBA building a B2B SaaS solution (no offense to those building brilliant, high-margin software businesses). From my experience at Avie AI, we never struggled with the question “How big could this be?” when we started. My co-founder and I had a deep belief that biometric data from multiple wearables was the future of preventative health and that chat interfaces would be the future of interrogating data sets (contrarian at the time), making it incredibly easy to present the size of the opportunity.

Since then, Avie partnered with and was eventually sold to the UK’s largest health and wellness retailer, a company that bought into our global vision. I, however, have become a “vision junkie” (trademark pending), hell-bent on finding those with the most grandiose visions for how the world can be in the future and supporting them in any way I can to make those visions a reality.

I met Greg Castle three years ago. He not only shared the perspective outlined above but had spent the previous five years supporting and investing in some of the most exciting entrepreneurs and their visions, including Oculus, Flexport, Mux, Anduril, Flock Safety, and Rec Room. So today, after moving to the Bay Area from London, I am incredibly excited to join forces with Greg and continue to find, fund, and support the most ambitious people and their visions for the future.

If you’re a founder with a clear and ambitious vision for your company and team, please get in touch at charlie@anorak.vc.