Notation Capital Is A New Pre-Seed Investment Fund From Betaworks’ Nick Chirls And Alex Lines

A new fund is rolling into town with a fresh $8 million to invest in pre-seed companies.

The fund is called Notation Capital, based in Brooklyn, and it is led by Nick Chirls, who led seed investment at betaworks and helped build Alphaworks, and Alex Lines, an architect at betaworks who contributed to products like Digg, Chartbeat, and bit.ly.

The duo originally targeted $6 million for the first fund at Notation Capital, but became slightly oversubscribed and settled at a cool $8 million. The money will go toward very early-stage companies who have yet to raise money and will give those startups the small boost they need without having to take millions in a seed round.

Here’s what the Notation Capital team said about it in a blog post:

To us, pre-seed is that in-between state at the infancy of many new companies. Some of these pre-seed projects and founders will fail, as lots of ambitious things do, some will continue to live for many years at side-project scale, and some will become big businesses that over time raise large amounts of capital when needed.

Notation Capital is built to fill this awkward early gap, supporting project and company building at the very earliest of stages.

The plan is for Notation Capital to be the first $100k to $200k check in rounds less than $400k total, and they believe no project is “too early” for financing.

Notation Capital is based out of Brooklyn.

If you’d like to learn more, you can check out the website here.