Floodgate

DEAD-tier fundraise contact. Killed on connector failure — the intro never landed (both paths). No meeting ever occurred; Floodgate never saw init.inc. Profile intentionally light. See Fundraise Relationship.

Disambiguation: Floodgate = Mike Maples Jr. + Ann Miura-Ko’s seed-stage micro-VC in Menlo Park (floodgate.com). Originally “Maples Investments,” renamed Floodgate in 2010.

Firm Profile

• Founded: 2006 (as Maples Investments; renamed Floodgate 2010) by Mike Maples Jr.; Ann Miura-Ko is co-founding partner.
• HQ: Menlo Park, CA (506 Santa Cruz Ave) + Palo Alto office.
• Stage focus: Pre-seed and seed — pioneered the micro-VC model, targeting overlooked founders and modest early rounds. Average check ~$500K–$5M. (Wikipedia)
• Fund size / vintage: Latest fund: Fund VIII (~$130Mtarget)\ast \ast —SECFormDfiled2026-04-30(signedAnnMiura-Ko;GPFloodgatePartnersVIIILLC),reportedbySiliconValleyBusinessJournal2026-05-01asthefir{m}^{\prime }seighthfund.Prior:\ast \ast Fund7=$146M (Oct 2021), $131M(VI),$76M (V), $75M(IV),$73.5M (III) — small, disciplined seed funds, not a multistage mega-fund. (Wikipedia, SEC EDGAR, SVBJ)
• Thesis: backs “prime movers” — visionary founders disrupting industries — across AI, enterprise software, fintech, consumer, healthcare, crypto. Early bets: Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, Okta, Refinery29, Chegg.
• Stage fit for init.inc: Floodgate’s pre-seed/seed sweet spot ($500K–$5M) matches init.inc’s zone. The kill was connector mechanics, not stage or thesis.

Partners

• Mike Maples Jr. — Founding Partner.
• Ann Miura-Ko — Co-founding Partner; the (intended) init.inc POC via Aaron’s primary path. Stanford lecturer; “prime mover” framework author.
• Iris Choi, Arjun Chopra, Mike Heller — Partners.
• Helen Moore — Associate & Chief of Staff to Ann Miura-Ko; was Niam’s secondary POC (light stub below).

Recent pre-seed/seed activity (Pass-1 sketch — ≤5 deals)

Full data → /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/floodgate.csv. Floodgate’s entire book is seed/pre-seed, so the CSV is on-stage by definition; populate with recent named seed leads. Sketch only.

Best data channels for this firm

Mike Maples publishes heavily — his Medium (“Floodgate Fund 6: The beginning of our second act”), the Pattern Breakers book/framework, and the firm blog are the best thesis sources. Ann Miura-Ko’s talks/fireside appearances cover the “prime mover” lens. For deal data: Crunchbase + portfolio announcements; Floodgate is usually a named early backer. vcsheet.com has clean per-partner breakdowns. As a small fund they don’t generate the press volume of multistage shops — first-party (Medium/blog) beats aggregators for thesis.

Fundraise Relationship (init.inc)

• Status: DEAD on connector failure. No ask was ever made; Floodgate never received the pitch. Stage and thesis were plausible (pre-seed/seed $500K–$5M, “prime mover” thesis), but the firm was unreachable through the available graph — no route landed.
• Conversation log (newest first):
  • 2026-05-13 — CLOSED / LOST (primary path). Killed: Aaron is not around to make the intro. Aaron originally offered the Ann Miura-Ko intro 2026-04-29; it never landed. No meeting, no reply, no POC engagement.
  • 2026-04-27 — secondary path stalled. Niam shared the blurb and offered to intro via Helen Moore (Associate & Chief of Staff to Ann); marked secondary behind Aaron’s primary. The intro was never sent — path stayed at “blurb-shared” and went cold alongside the primary.
• Mutual connections / warm path: Aaron (primary → Ann Miura-Ko, lapsed) and Niam (secondary → Helen Moore, never sent). Both dead. Re-touch trigger: any new warm intro to Ann Miura-Ko or the Floodgate partnership (clean, on-stage firm).
• Competitor-conflict flag: None found. Floodgate does not appear on any init.inc competitor cap table (see cap-table-patterns-across-startup-competitors). Clean lane.
• Live stage: Lost (CRM, closed 2026-05-13).

Light POC stub — Helen Moore

Helen Moore — Associate & Chief of Staff to Ann Miura-Ko at Floodgate. Niam’s secondary POC; blurb shared 2026-04-27, intro never sent. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/helen-moore-stanford/. (Not given a full person page at DEAD tier; recorded here as the warm-path node if the Floodgate line is ever revived.)

Cross-check vs existing wiki

No prior Floodgate mention in the competitor cap-table synthesis — no contradiction. This page resolves previously-broken [[entities/floodgate]] wikilinks.

Related

• cap-table-patterns-across-startup-competitors
• Init Intelligence

Pass 2 deal pattern (2026-05-25)

Seed lead-rate: HIGH (per their model) — check size $1.5-5M.\ast \ast Pass2net-new:\ast \ast Bluejay$4M seed (Aug 2025, Floodgate-led, ~$1.5-2MFloodgatecheck)\ast \ast —AIagenttesting/reliabilityinfra,YCX25batch,two23yoex-Amazon/Microsoftfounders.Confirms\ast \ast Wavedash$4.3M seed (Dec 2025, Maples-led). Both land squarely in the firm’s stated $500K-$5M sweet spot and reflect the “prime-mover / pattern-breaker” lens (Bluejay’s “reliability not intelligence” framing is exactly the kind of non-consensus inflection Maples writes about). Follow-on/participated activity also active: Eudia $105M Series A (Feb 2026, GC-led, Floodgate participated) — AI legal-tech. Stage-fit for init.inc: Floodgate’s recent book is the stage init.inc occupies. The DEAD status is connector-failure mechanics, not stage or thesis. Best data channel: Mike Maples Jr’s Medium + the Pattern Breakers framework for thesis; Crunchbase + portfolio press for deal data (Floodgate is almost always named as lead); Silicon Legal Strategy (counsel) and Fenwick frequently surface clean deal-level confirmations. vcsheet.com per-partner pages remain useful. Cap-table-clean re-confirmed: zero init.inc-competitor exposure across Pass-2 rows. Re-touch trigger from Pass 1 stands: any new warm intro to Ann Miura-Ko, Mike Maples Jr, or the partnership — the firm itself remains a legitimately on-stage target if a path opens.