Former SeaChange investors form new angel group in Seattle backing early stage startups

A trio of Seattle-area angel investors recently launched a new group called VentureUs that aims to make pre-seed and seed investments in startups across the Pacific Northwest.

Jenn Wrenn Henry, Jonathan Kagle, and Keith Laepple previously invested together as part of SeaChange, a Seattle-based investment group formerly known as Seattle Angel Fund that launched in 2014 but recently stopped making investments.

“We wanted to keep the band together,” Laepple said.

VentureUs is structured similarly to SeaChange, which used a collaborative approach with its members, analyzing potential investments as a group before picking startups to back.

But VentureUs made several key changes to help streamline the investing process. Instead of relying on votes from members, VentureUs established an investment board that ultimately makes the final call on investing.

The idea is to bring more consistency to investment decisions, both for membership and founders who pitch the board.

“Founders will get more value,” said Laepple, who spent more than two decades at Microsoft in various leadership roles.

VentureUs plans to make 6-to-10 investments per year in startups across various industries, as part of an annual fund. It will invest between $100,000 to $400,000 for each check. It has already backed three companies:

• Nowadays, an event-planning startup
• Roby, a building energy management startup
• Ambassador, a customer referral startup

There are more than 40 investors in the group. Members can also make additional “sidecar” investments. “That gives founders an opportunity to get a boost to their check size, and it gives our investors an opportunity to put extra money in on the deals that they really like,” Wrenn Henry said.

VentureUs is also focused on attracting more people to angel investing.

The lack of angel investors is a longstanding critique of the Seattle startup ecosystem, especially given the amount of wealthy tech execs in town who made their fortunes at places like Microsoft and Amazon.

“We’re all really passionate about growing new investors,” said Wrenn Henry, a former manager at Slalom and Starbucks.

Washington state had 2.7% of all pre-seed deals in the U.S. over the past year, according to Carta. That compares to 38% for California, and ranks behind states such as Massachusetts, Florida, and Texas.

There are other efforts across Seattle and the Pacific Northwest to help generate angel activity and educate first-time startup investors, such as Seattle Angel Conference, Alliance of Angels, and other initiatives.

“We believe that there are a lot of great companies here, and they are undervalued and they are under-supported,” said Kagle, a former longtime Microsoft employee.

Susan Preston, former managing partner at SeaChange, and a longtime Seattle-area investor, is an advisor with VentureUs.

Former SeaChange leaders William Finney and Peter Mueller now run Seattle-based investment firm Breakwater Ventures.