Floodgate

Floodgate is a small seed firm with an outsized list of early bets. It names Twitter, Lyft, Okta and Twitch among the companies it backed before they had their famous names. The firm still works at the earliest stage, pre-seed and seed. Its office is on Santa Cruz Avenue in downtown Menlo Park, a few steps from El Camino Real.

This page is a neutral explainer for founders and curious readers. It draws on Floodgate's website and published reporting, with sources named where figures appear. For the basics of seed investing, start with our seed and pre-seed funds page.

Founding and partners

Mike Maples Jr. first invested as Maples Investments. In March 2010 TechCrunch reported that he was turning that practice into a professional venture firm called Floodgate. A 2017 TechCrunch report described Floodgate as an 11-year-old firm at the time, which places its start in about 2006. Ann Miura-Ko is credited as a co-founder.

The firm's team page lists four partners: Mike Maples Jr., Ann Miura-Ko, Iris Choi and Mike Heller. A small staff supports them. That is a typical size for a dedicated seed firm, where a few partners write a limited number of checks each year. A small team also means each partner's judgment carries a lot of weight. Founders who meet Floodgate are usually talking with someone who can push a decision forward, not a junior screener. The flip side is limited bandwidth. A seed firm this size cannot take every meeting, which is why introductions matter.

Floodgate's site links to Pattern Breakers, a book by Maples and Peter Ziebelman about how breakthrough startups depart from conventional thinking. The book's ideas show up across the firm's writing about what it looks for in founders.

The Santa Cruz Avenue office

Floodgate lists its office at 506 Santa Cruz Ave., Suite 200, Menlo Park, CA 94025. The building sits at the El Camino Real end of Santa Cruz Avenue, the main street of downtown Menlo Park. Kepler's Books is a short walk away and the Menlo Park Caltrain station is a short walk away.

When TechCrunch covered its sixth fund in 2017, it called Floodgate a Palo Alto based firm. The firm now lists only the Menlo Park address. Another investor, Sapphire Ventures, lists an office a few doors west on the same street. Our Santa Cruz Avenue guide covers the street's shops and cafes. The office is private and meetings are by appointment.

Stage and beliefs

Floodgate's homepage gives its focus in one line: "Backing extraordinary founders at pre-seed and seed." Its beliefs page goes further. The firm says it wants to be a founder's first true believer, before traction, before proven success metrics and before product-market fit.

The page makes a few points worth noting for founders:

• Early on purpose. Floodgate says it backs founders before the rest of the world believes.
• Breakthroughs, not experiments. The firm says a breakthrough startup is not a lottery ticket and that the future is designed, not random.
• Hands-on support. It calls itself a co-conspirator rather than just an investor and promises honest conversations when they are hard.
• Consumer and B2B. It says it has worked with consumer and business startups over the last two decades.

Floodgate also says the companies it has worked with are collectively worth more than $100 billion. That is the firm's own figure and it describes company values, not fund returns.

Notable investments

Floodgate's beliefs page names four early bets by their original identities:

The companies page tells short stories about others. It recalls that Justin Kan pitched Justin.tv in 2007 as a reality show that livecast his life. Floodgate says it was unsure about the idea but sure about the team. Current companies featured there include four newer names:

• Applied Intuition, which builds software for autonomous vehicles.
• Hebbia, an AI search company whose founder left a Stanford PhD program to start it.
• Hadrian, which builds automated factories for aerospace and defense parts.
• SmarterDx, which uses AI to find diagnoses missing from hospital records.

The pattern across old and new names is the same. Floodgate tends to show up when a company is still an unusual idea held by a small team.

Published profiles add Chegg, TaskRabbit and Rappi to the list. As with any seed portfolio, most companies do not reach this kind of outcome. A highlights page shows the exceptions.

Funds

Floodgate raises small funds by venture standards. Published reports give this history:

• Third fund: $73.5 million.
• Fourth fund: $75 million, reported by Fortune in July 2012.
• Fifth fund: $76 million.
• Sixth fund: $131 million, reported by TechCrunch in March 2017 based on an SEC filing.
• Seventh fund: $146 million, reported in October 2021.

We could not confirm a newer fund from the firm or reliable press, so we stop there. Small funds shape how a seed firm behaves. A fund of this size can lead many seed rounds but usually leaves larger later rounds to other investors. Our glossary explains reserves and follow-on investing.

Floodgate in the local ecosystem

Floodgate helped define the modern seed firm. When it turned professional in 2010, a new group of small funds was forming to back companies before the large firms on Sand Hill Road would. Many of those funds called themselves micro VCs. Today seed funds are a normal step between angels and a Series A. Our accelerators guide covers the programs that often sit alongside them at the earliest stage. Floodgate's move from a Palo Alto address to downtown Menlo Park also mirrors a wider shift. Several firms now work along Santa Cruz Avenue and El Camino Real rather than up the hill.

How founders reach Floodgate

Floodgate does not publish a pitch form or general email address on the pages we checked. Its team page includes a short "prepare to pitch" section whose first point asks founders to come with their breakthrough insight and explain what makes the company special. Practical steps:

1. Sharpen the one insight that others miss about your market. Floodgate's writing returns to this idea again and again.
2. Read the companies page to see the kinds of founders it backs.
3. Ask a founder, angel or lawyer who knows the partners for a short introduction.
4. Expect questions about why now and why your team, more than about early metrics.

Our pitching guide covers how to run a fundraising process.

Frequently asked questions