Shawn Carolan
Partner
A Pre-Seed Fund and More
The Inception Fund offers personalized support to exceptional founders
- Solo founders or founding teams who haven’t raised any institutional capital
- Very early: somewhere between exploring an opportunity and signing first customers
- Deep experience as a technical or operational leader, paired with a zero-to-one mindset
- Intent on solving a venture-scale problem with AI
- Dedicated 10-20 hours per week for idea vetting and iteration with the Menlo team for up to three months
- Access to Menlo’s top-tier network of co-investors, advisors, contractors, and operators
- Access to unpublished thesis research on promising opportunity spaces
- Be one of only ~10 founders per year to receive customized programming and support
- Pre-seed funding
What Inception Fund Founders Say
When I joined, I was one person with an idea and a proof of concept. I had a bunch of knowledge of how to build the technology to accomplish the end goal, but I didn’t know where to start. Fast forward about a year and we had paying customers and could articulate a vision for the product and the business that got investors really excited to work with us.
Devin Bhushan
Founder and CEO, Squint
From the start, the Inception Fund team felt like an extension of my own. They helped sharpen my vision, challenge assumptions with thoughtful questions, and help validate core pain points through customer interviews. Equally important, they helped strengthen conviction in the problem I was solving. Their support made the journey feel like building with a trusted partner.
Dominic Toselli
Founder and CEO
The Menlo Inception team felt like true co-founders from day one. They pushed me to refine the thesis, stress-tested ideas with hard questions, and helped get key meetings long before we wrote a line of code. It never felt like I was doing this alone.
Rami Alhamad
Founder and CEO
The Inception Sprint
3 MONTHS
Identify an opportunity
Pinpoint an urgent need in a big market
Define a wedge
Hyper-focus the product to capture initial market share
Get first customers
Book revenue before writing a line of code
Build your team
Hire A+ players to execute rapidly
PERKS
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01
Initial + pre-seed funding
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02
10–20 hrs/week with a zero-to-one expert
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03
Guidance from a Menlo Partner focused on your space
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04
Startup-ops-in-a-box
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05
Design, GTM, Recruiting Support
Our Principles
01
Durable value creation comes from solving big, important problems.
02
No two companies should be built the same way.
03
The wedge is harder to nail than the vision.
04
The answers you need are outside the building.
05
Entrepreneurs build. Investors support.
06
Great execution beats great ideas every time.
Our Companies
Built from scratch, built to scale.
Alma is reimagining nutrition tracking by combining AI with an intuitive experience, transforming how people approach nutrition and healthy eating.
Milestones
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2024 – Founded
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2024 – Seed
Leadership
Rami Alhamad
Founder & CEO
Partners
Assemble Labs is building the professional-grade AI copilot for electrical engineers.
Milestones
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2024 – Founded
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2025 – Partnered, Pre-Seed
Leadership
Nima Banai
Co-Founder & CEO
Craig Schindler
Co-Founder & CTO
Partners
Atta’s AI agents help you tackle any analytical challenge—model data, discovering hidden patterns, or forecasting what’s next.
Milestones
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2024 – Founded
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2024 – Partnered, SAFE
Leadership
Amine Ben Khalifa
Co-Founder & CEO
Omar Shaik
Co-Founder
Partners
BeHeard reimagines feedback by transforming boring surveys into continuous, heart-to-heart conversations with brands.
Leadership
Mayank Mehta
Co-Founder & CEO
Aneesh Karve
Co-Founder & CTO
Partners
Colla Health provides accessible, relevant behavioral health care to the 17 million cancer patients in the U.S. as an extension of their medical treatment.
Milestones
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2023 – Founded
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2023 – Partnered, SAFE
Leadership
Milan Thakor
Founder & CEO
Partners
NegotiateAI is a manufacturing and industrials procurement platform for cleaning ERP spend data, benchmarking, and negotiating indirect spend.
Milestones
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2024 – Founded
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2025 – Partnered, Seed
Leadership
Dominic Toselli
Founder & CEO
Partners
Squint is the leading manufacturing intelligence platform for capturing tribal knowledge, enforcing standard work, and analyzing rich insights—all on a platform operators love.
Milestones
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2021 – Founded
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2022 – Partnered, Pre-Seed
Leadership
Devin Bhushan
Founder & CEO
Dylan Conway
Founding Product Lead
Jim Zhu
Founding Engineering Lead
Partners
WorkUp is a talent pipeline management tool to help the healthcare system solve the clinical workforce shortage.
Milestones
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2022 – Founded
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2023 – Partnered, Seed
Leadership
Zachary Fleitman
Founder & CEO
Partners
FAQs
No—you’re exactly who we’re here for. We work with founders who are pre-product and pre-revenue, helping them identify venture-scale opportunities at the earliest stage.
We invest what you need to hit your next milestone. Typically, that starts with a small SAFE (~$100K per founder) to run an inception sprint, followed by a full pre-seed if we’re both excited to keep building together.
Not at all. We prefer to be the first institutional capital, but angel funding is absolutely fine.
Applications are rolling. You’ll hear back within two weeks. If you advance, you’ll meet our team, share more about your company, and—if there’s a fit—move into diligence before a final decision.
Nope. We back both solo founders and teams. If you’re solo, we’ll also help you find the right co-founder(s).
Only if we make a full pre-seed investment, and even then it’s evaluated case by case.