We tend to think of venture capital in tens or hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, so it’s refreshing to find Evening Fund, a new $2 million micro fund that focuses on small investments between $50,000 and $100,000 as it seeks to help young startups with early funding.
The new fund was launched by Kat Orekhova and Rapha Danilo. Orekhova, who started her career as a math professor, is a former Facebook data scientist who has been dabbling in angel investing and working with young startups for awhile now. They call it Evening Fund because they work as founders by day and investors by night.
She says that she wanted to create something more formal to help early-stage startups get off the ground and has help from limited partners that include Sarah Smith at Bain Capital, Lee Linden, general partner at Quiet Capital and a long list of tech industry luminaries.
Orekhova says she and her partner invest small sums of money in B2B SaaS companies, which are pre-seed, seed and occasionally A rounds. They will invest in consumer here and there as well. She says one of their key value propositions is that they can help with more than just the money. “One way in which I think Rapha and I can really help our founders is that we give very specific, practical advice, not just kind of super high level,” she told me.
That could be something like how to hire your first designer where the founders may not even know what a designer does. “You’re figuring out ‘how do I hire my first designer?’ and ‘what does the designer even do?’ because most founders have never hired a designer before. So we give them extremely practical hands-on stuff like ‘here are the competencies’ or ‘what’s the difference between a graphic designer, a visual designer, a UX designer and a researcher,’ ” she said. They go so far as to give them a list of candidates to help them get going.
She says that she realized while she was at Facebook that she wanted to eventually start a company, so she began volunteering her time to work with companies going through Y Combinator. “I think a lot of people don’t know where to start, but in my case I looked at the YC list, found a company that I thought I could be helpful to. I reached out cold and said ‘Hey, I don’t want money. I don’t want equity. I just want to try to be helpful to you and see where that goes,’ ” she said.
That lead to scouting for startups for some larger venture capital firms and eventually dabbling in financing some of these startups that she was helping. Today’s announcement is the culmination of these years of work and the groundwork she laid to make herself familiar with how the startup ecosystem works.
The new firm already has its first investment under its belt, Dala, an AI-powered internal search tool that helps connect users to workplace knowledge that’s often locked in applications like Google Suite, Slack and Notion.
As though Evening isn’t enough to keep her and Danilo busy, they are also each working on their own startups. Orekhova wasn’t ready to share much on that just yet as her company remains in stealth.