Powerset

Disambiguation (read first): Our firm is powerset.co — the founder-angel platform founded late 2022 by Jake Zeller + Jonathan Swanson, HQ San Francisco. It is NOT the famous Powerset (powerset.com) — the natural-language semantic-search startup (founded 2006 by Barney Pell, Lorenzo Thione, Steve Newcomb; raised ~$12.5MSeriesAfromFoundationCapital+FoundersFund;\ast \ast acquiredbyMicrosoftinJuly2008for$100M** and folded into Bing). Two completely unrelated companies sharing a name; the old one is dead. Confirmed via TechCrunch (Jan 2025), Axios (Oct 2022), and the firm’s own site. ✅

Firm Profile

Powerset is a “decentralized venture fund” / founder-angel platform — not a partner-led seed fund. Its hypothesis (Jake Zeller, TechCrunch Jan 2025): “What if the best investors aren’t venture capitalists but other founders, scribbling off checks in between late-night coding sessions and board meetings?”

• Model (the whole thing): Each year Powerset selects 5–10 elite technical founders and gives each a $1Mfund\ast \ast toinvestinearly-stagestartups—\ast nottheirownmoney\ast .Asafounderbuildsaninvestingtrackrecord,theycan\ast \ast unlockupto$15M+ in additional capital for follow-ons / bigger deals. Founders earn 15% carry on profits and have no administrative obligations and no timeline to deploy. There is no IC, no “teaching” program, and no managing partner who can veto a deal — investments are made entirely on each cohort founder’s own conviction. This sits between angel investing (but with Powerset’s capital, not the founder’s) and the old VC scout model.^[TechCrunch 2025-01-14 + Axios 2022-10-04]
• Founded: late 2022 (Sep 2022 per LinkedIn). HQ: San Francisco.
• Capital / size: Debuted with ~$30M\ast \ast thatJake+Jonathanassembled"largelyfromtheirownmoneyandthatoffriends,"withastated\ast \ast ambitiontoraiseupto$314M (Axios, Oct 2022). Tiny core team (~4 staff on LinkedIn) — the capital is deployed through the cohort founders, so Powerset’s “AUM” footprint is intentionally lean relative to checks written. ^[single-source on the $314M target — Axios only]
• Lineage: Directly modeled on Spearhead (the AngelList × Accomplice JV that gave founders capital to angel-invest), which Jake helped lead from its inception. Powerset is Jake’s independent, scaled-up version of that thesis.
• Stage / check posture: Pre-seed / seed early-stage checks written by cohort founders (typically angel-sized out of the $1Mbase;largerviathe$15M follow-on unlock). Sector follows the cohort founders’ own domains (heavily dev-tools / infra / AI, given who they recruit).
• Selection bar: Extremely selective — “Last year we evaluated over 1,000 founders for Cohort 2 and accepted eight.” The deal-breaker: Jake will not take founders who view Powerset as an off-ramp to becoming a full-time VC — “Those people are going to perform terribly.” He wants founders committed to building their own company for the next 5–10 years. Cohort 4 applications were open as of early 2026.
• Track record (self-reported): Cohort 1 & 2 founders have collectively raised >$1.5Bata>$9B valuation for their own companies and produced open-source projects with 181k+ GitHub stars. Since launch in Q1 2023, cohort founders have invested in Braintrust, ElectricSQL, Resend, Tessl, Tobiko, and 80+ more — companies that have since raised >$250M in follow-ons from Accel, a16z, Greylock and others.^[Jake Zeller LinkedIn, 2025-01-14]

The cohort founders (the “investors”)

The people writing checks are themselves notable founders. Public roster includes (plain text — these are portfolio/cohort founders, not roster targets): Paul Copplestone (Supabase), Jordan Tigani (MotherDuck), Wes McKinney (pandas / Voltron Data), Spencer Kimball (Cockroach Labs), Anton Osika (Lovable), George Sivulka (Hebbia), Akshat Bubna (Modal), Caitlin Colgrove (Hex), Asta Li (Privy, acq. Stripe), Savin Goyal (Outerbounds), Noor Siddiqui (Orchid), David Li (Meliora), Tom Hacohen (Svix), Travis McPeak (Resourcely). ^[from powerset.co roster — likely partial]

Partners / Team

• Jake Zeller — Founder. Ex-AngelList (built the online venture-funds product), ex-Spearhead partner from inception. Our POC.
• Jonathan Swanson — Co-founder. Also co-founder/chairman of Thumbtack and founder/chairman of Athena (the EA-delegation company; notable Latin-America operations — see LatAm note below). Long-time co-investor with Jake (their joint vehicle is “JJK”).
• Patrick DeVivo — Founding Engineer & Partner (joined ~2024; built/builds Powerset’s tooling). (plain text — not a roster target)
• Arthur Chen — Founding Engineer & Partner. (plain text — not a roster target)
• Sebastian — Powerset-side attendee of init.inc’s 5/11 meeting who raised the LatAm-GTM questions; last name unresolved from public sources — see Sebastian (Powerset). ^[ambiguous]

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

Caveat that defines this firm’s data: Powerset does not write checks as a named lead VC. Deals are made by cohort founders drawing on their $1M Powerset fund, so they surface in press (if at all) under the cohort founder’s name or simply as undisclosed angel/SAFE participation — rarely attributed to “Powerset.” The firm’s only public deal claims are the aggregate ones below. Treat all rows as ❓ unverified for amount/date/role.

• Braintrust (AI eval/observability) — named by Powerset as a cohort investment. Role: participated via cohort founder. ❓
• Resend (email API for devs) — named cohort investment. ❓
• ElectricSQL (local-first sync) — named cohort investment. ❓
• Tessl (AI-native software dev) — named cohort investment. ❓
• Tobiko (SQLMesh / data transformation) — named cohort investment. ❓

Full data → /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/powerset.csv.

Best data channels for this firm

• Best: the firm site (powerset.co) for the model + cohort roster; TechCrunch (Margaux MacColl, 2025-01-14) and Axios (Kia Kokalitcheva, 2022-10-04) for the canonical model + capital figures; Jake Zeller’s LinkedIn for the aggregate portfolio/track-record claims.
• Weak / unusable for deal data: The Venture Codex / SEC Form D / aggregators will NOT meaningfully cover Powerset — because it never appears as a named lead and deploys through cohort founders, there is no clean “Powerset’s deals” feed anywhere. Per-deal amounts/dates are effectively unrecoverable from free sources; do not fabricate them. For real intel here, the cohort founders’ own announcements + direct conversation with Jake are the only reliable channels.

Fundraise Relationship (init.inc)

• Context: A Powerset check is effectively a bet from one (or more) of the cohort founders (Supabase / MotherDuck / Cockroach / Lovable / Hex-caliber technical founders) — an angel from someone who has built the thing, plus the halo/intro network of that founder. The deal-doer on any Powerset check is a cohort founder, with Jake as the routing layer. The LatAm-GTM thread (raised by Sebastian in the meeting) is why the next conversation was handed to Isaiah (init cofounder, GTM) — see below.
• Conversation log (newest first):
  • 2026-05-12, 7:47 PM — Sazzad iMessaged Jake looping in Isaiah (init cofounder, GTM) to go deeper on the Powerset playbook + LatAm pieces; handing the next conversation to Isaiah. (CRM)
  • 2026-05-11, 3:30–4:30 PM — Sazzad met Jake Zeller in person at The Battery (717 Battery St, SF). “Interesting” meeting. Sebastian (Powerset side) raised LatAm-GTM questions during the meet. (CRM)
  • Intro by TJ. Jake is the POC at Powerset. Live stage: Follow-Up Phase (tracked in CRM).
• Mutual connections / warm path: TJ (made the intro). Powerset-side contacts: Jake Zeller (POC) → Sebastian (LatAm-GTM).
• Personal & rapport notes: Powerset’s whole ethos is “founders backing founders” — Jake explicitly values founders who treat their company as their life’s work, not a stepping-stone to VC (the exact profile Powerset selects its investors for). The LatAm-GTM dimension surfaced in the 5/11 meeting and routes to the Isaiah follow-up.
• Live stage: tracked in the CRM (Google Sheet).

LatAm-GTM angle ^[inferred]

Sebastian (Powerset side) probed init.inc’s Latin-America go-to-market in the 5/11 meeting, which is why the follow-up routed to Isaiah (GTM). A plausible reason this resonates at Powerset: co-founder Jonathan Swanson’s other company, Athena (executive-assistant delegation), runs substantial Latin-America operations — it scaled across the US/Philippines/Kenya and is expanding into Guatemala to tap “Latin America’s bilingual talent pool.” There is likely real operational LatAm muscle and interest in the founders’ orbit. Inferred, not confirmed — treat as a thesis to test with Isaiah’s follow-up, not a stated fact. ⚠️

Cross-check vs existing wiki

• TJ already lists Powerset / Jake Zeller as a “Follow Up Phase” edge — consistent with this page. No contradictions found against existing vault content. No competitor cap-table overlap detected (Powerset deploys via cohort founders, not as a named co-investor on any tracked competitor).

Related

Jake Zeller · Jonathan Swanson · Sebastian (Powerset) · TJ

Pass 2 deal pattern (2026-05-25)

Verified ~18–24mo pull (Nov 2024 → May 2026): per-deal data is structurally UNRECOVERABLE — CONFIRMED. Full data: /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/powerset.csv (7 rows; net-new vs Pass-1: 0 new attributable deals + 1 confirmed aggregate metric). The Pass-1 hypothesis that Powerset never surfaces as a named investor is now affirmatively tested and confirmed.

• Lead rate / check / stage: N/A at the firm level. Powerset does not write checks as “Powerset.” Each cohort, 5–10 founders each get a **$1MPowersetfund\ast \ast (15$15M follow-on unlock) and invest on their own conviction — no IC, no veto, no managing partner on the deal. Checks surface (if at all) under the cohort founder’s name or as undisclosed angel/SAFE participation. A date-filtered Exa search ("Powerset" investor seed round … participation, Nov 2024→) returned ZERO attributable rounds — only firm-model articles. The 5 named cohort investments (Braintrust, Resend, ElectricSQL, Tessl, Tobiko) remain ❓ — no amount/date/role recoverable from free sources.
• Cadence: unmeasurable at firm level (deploys through cohort founders). What IS confirmed: Cohort 3 filled; Cohort 4 applications planned Q1 2026 (firm site). Aggregate capital made available to founders: **$200M+\ast \ast ("Providedfounderswithover$200M to start investing,” powerset.co) — consistent with the Axios 2022 ~$30M debut + stated scale ambition. This is a platform throughput figure, not deal-level data.
• Sector mix (inferred from cohort + named investments): heavily dev-tools / data-infra / AI — a function of who Powerset recruits as cohort founders (Supabase, MotherDuck, Cockroach, Modal, Hebbia, Privy, Svix caliber). The named investments (Braintrust=AI eval, Resend=email API, ElectricSQL=local-first sync, Tessl=AI software dev, Tobiko=data transform) all sit in that lane.
• Partner attribution: inverted. The “partner” on any Powerset deal IS a cohort founder (e.g. a Supabase/MotherDuck-caliber technical founder), not a Powerset employee. Jake Zeller (founder/POC) + Jonathan Swanson are the platform operators, not the deal-doers. The deal-doer is whichever cohort founder’s domain overlaps, with Jake as the routing layer.
• Best data channel: direct conversation with Jake + the cohort founders’ own announcements are the ONLY reliable channels for real intel. TechCrunch (Margaux MacColl, 2025-01-14) and the firm site are canonical for the model + aggregate claims; Axios (2022-10-04) for capital/history. ⚠️ The Venture Codex / SEC Form D / all standard aggregators do NOT cover Powerset’s deals — there is no “Powerset’s deals” feed anywhere because it never appears as a named investor. Do not fabricate per-deal rows; →COULDN’T-GET is the honest verdict for round-level data. (Disambiguation reminder: this is powerset.co, NOT the 2008 Microsoft-acquired semantic-search Powerset — that trap was checked and is not a data source.)