Acme Ventures

About

Acme Ventures is an early-stage venture fund based in San Francisco that invests primarily in fintech and developer infrastructure companies. Founded in 2018 by Jane Smith and Derek Howell, the firm manages $85M across two funds ¹. They typically write first checks of $500K to $2M at the pre-seed and seed stages, with meaningful reserves for follow-on participation through Series A ².

The firm is known for its hands-on approach to portfolio support, running a dedicated founder-in-residence program and hosting quarterly “build weeks” where portfolio founders collaborate on shared technical challenges ³.

Stated Thesis

Acme Ventures publicly describes their focus as backing “technical founders reshaping financial infrastructure and developer workflows.” On their website, they emphasize three pillars ¹:

1. Foundational plumbing – companies building core infrastructure that other startups depend on.
2. Fintech for the underserved – financial products reaching customers ignored by incumbents.
3. Developer leverage – tools that give small engineering teams outsized capability.

Jane Smith has stated in interviews that they look for “founders who have personally felt the pain they are solving, ideally for years before starting the company” ⁴.

Inferred Thesis

Based on analysis of their 23 known portfolio investments:

• 48% fintech and payments infrastructure
• 30% developer tools and DevOps
• 13% data infrastructure
• 9% other B2B SaaS

Notable patterns:

• 83% of investments had at least one technical co-founder with prior experience at a top-tier tech company (FAANG, Stripe, Plaid, etc.) ²
• 70% of portfolio companies were based in SF or NYC at the time of investment
• 61% had some measurable traction (revenue or significant open-source adoption) at the time of the seed round
• Average check size at seed: $1.4M
• Median pre-money valuation at seed: $12M

They appear to have a slight preference for B2B companies with usage-based or consumption pricing models, though this is not stated explicitly.

Portfolio

In Their Own Words

“We don’t need to see a perfect deck. We need to see a founder who understands the problem at a molecular level and has an unfair insight into why now is the moment it can be solved.” – Jane Smith, Partner, at SeedConf 2025 ⁴

“Our job isn’t to tell founders what to build. Our job is to remove every obstacle between them and building it.” – Derek Howell, Partner, on the Venture Voices podcast ⁵

“We index heavily on the technical depth of the founding team. If both co-founders can ship production code, that’s a signal we pay attention to.” – Bob Jones, Principal, in a blog post on the Acme website ⁶

What Founders Say

“Acme was the only investor in our seed round who actually read our API docs before the first meeting. Jane came in with specific questions about our rate-limiting approach. That told me everything I needed to know about the kind of partner they’d be.” – Priya Kapoor, CEO of Ledgerly ⁷

“Bob introduced us to three of our first five enterprise customers. He didn’t just make intros – he prepped both sides so the conversations were productive from minute one.” – Marcus Tran, CTO of PipeRoute ⁸

“They were honest with us when our initial go-to-market wasn’t working. Not harsh, but direct. That feedback probably saved us six months of wandering.” – Aisha Okafor, CEO of NomadPay ⁹

Sources