Moonshots Capital

Moonshots Capital was founded in 2017 by two West Point graduates and military veterans — Craig Cummings and Kelly Perdew — who bring over 30 years of combined entrepreneurship and venture capital experience to the early-stage tech ecosystem. Headquartered in Austin, Texas with an additional office in Los Angeles, the firm has built a reputation for identifying and backing founders who embody the discipline, resilience, and strategic thinking developed through military service.

The firm operates across two dedicated funds: Fund I closed at $20 million in 2017 and backed 14 companies, while Fund II raised $36 million in 2021 to continue investing in exceptional early-stage founders. Through various syndicate investment vehicles, Moonshots Capital has deployed more than $65 million into over 40 companies — a track record that includes some of the most recognizable names in tech.

What sets Moonshots Capital apart is the partners' willingness to back founders at the earliest stages, often when a company is little more than a bold vision and a founding team with the conviction to pursue it. Their portfolio includes nine unicorns to date, a remarkable ratio for a seed-stage firm that prefers to lead or co-lead rounds rather than follow other investors.

Beyond capital, Moonshots Capital offers portfolio companies access to a tight-knit network of veteran entrepreneurs, operational advisors with domain expertise, and a community of founders who have built and scaled companies across multiple market cycles. This support structure is particularly valuable for founders navigating the transition from early product development to commercial scale.

The firm's name reflects its philosophy: true moonshots are rarely about luck — they are the result of exceptional leadership, rigorous execution, and the willingness to pursue opportunities that others consider too ambitious or too early to evaluate.

Moonshots Capital's investment thesis is unusually focused: the firm invests exclusively in companies led by what they call "extraordinary leaders" — founders with exceptional execution ability, deep domain expertise, and the clarity of vision required to pursue transformative opportunities at earliest stages. This people-first philosophy means the partners spend more time evaluating the founding team than the specific market or product.

The partners — both West Point graduates with military intelligence backgrounds — apply the same systematic evaluation to founders that they learned in their prior careers: assess the person's track record, intellectual rigor, leadership qualities, and ability to attract talent and mobilize resources under pressure. A compelling market opportunity matters, but Moonshots Capital's core conviction is that world-class founders find a way to win regardless of the initial conditions.

Moonshots Capital invests at the seed stage, typically leading or co-leading rounds with check sizes ranging from $500,000 to $2 million. The firm has the flexibility to write larger checks through syndicate vehicles when a company is pursuing a particularly large opportunity. The firm has deployed across Fund I, Fund II, and a separate angel portfolio, allowing the partners to tailor participation to each company's stage and capital needs.

Sector-agnostic in practice, Moonshots Capital's portfolio spans fintech (Robinhood, Bitium), enterprise software (Slack, which sold to Salesforce for $27.7 billion), robotics (Apptronik), aerospace (SpaceX, Neuralink), and e-commerce infrastructure (Cart.com). The common thread is never the sector — it is always the caliber of the founding team and the size of the opportunity.

The firm's veterans-in-tech focus means a meaningful share of portfolio companies are founded by military veterans, though Moonshots Capital is not limited to this group. The firm explicitly states it invests in companies led by extraordinary individuals regardless of background, provided they demonstrate the leadership qualities the partners have learned to recognize through decades of evaluation.

Technical due diligence at Moonshots Capital is rigorous, with the partners drawing on an advisory network that includes former NSA officers, combat veterans who have transitioned to deep tech, and domain experts across AI, robotics, and aerospace. This network allows the firm to evaluate companies working on problems with long development timelines and high technical complexity — precisely the companies most other seed funds cannot adequately assess.

Moonshots Capital has maintained an active investment pace through 2024 and 2025, deploying capital from its $36 million Fund II alongside continued syndicate participation. The firm's deal flow has remained strong, reflecting the partner network's deep connections across the Austin and Los Angeles tech ecosystems as well as national visibility from portfolio successes.

The firm's 2021 Fund II close positioned it well for a market environment that became increasingly selective in 2022 and 2023, where seed-stage valuations compressed and many funds contracted. Moonshots Capital's disciplined deployment — writing checks in the $500K to $2M range rather than chasing oversized rounds — allowed the partners to maintain dry powder while peers were writing larger checks at higher valuations.

Recent activity includes participation in several human capital and AI infrastructure deals, reflecting the firm's thesis that AI-powered companies represent a generational platform shift analogous to the mobile and internet transitions of prior decades. The partners have been particularly active in evaluating robotics companies, where their technical advisory network provides an edge in due diligence.

Moonshots Capital continues to demonstrate commitment to its portfolio through follow-on investments. The firm's ability and willingness to support companies across multiple financing rounds is a meaningful signal to founders evaluating the firm as a potential partner — unlike passive seed investors who are structurally unable to participate in Series A rounds, Moonshots Capital maintains reserves for reserve capital.

Market conditions have influenced how the firm thinks about deployment cadence and sector focus, but the core thesis — exceptional founders pursuing transformative markets — has remained constant through multiple market cycles since the firm's founding.

The firm recently crossed its 100th company milestone, a testament to the partners' disciplined approach to sourcing and the firm's capital efficiency. With 9 unicorns in the portfolio and multiple additional companies at late-stage growth, the track record reflects a combination of strong company selection and genuine portfolio support.

Moonshots Capital's portfolio reads like a tour of the companies that defined the last decade of consumer and enterprise technology. Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) went public in 2021 in one of the most anticipated fintech IPOs in history, while Slack sold to Salesforce in 2021 for $27.7 billion in the largest enterprise software acquisition of its era. Both represent the kind of category-defining exits that generate outsized returns for seed investors who believed early.

Apptronik has emerged as one of the most closely watched hardware companies in the world. The Austin-based humanoid robotics startup has raised over $850 million in total funding — including a $520 million Series A extension in early 2026 — tripling its valuation in roughly twelve months. Moonshots Capital was an early investor, backing the company when it was working on exoskeleton technology before pivoting to full humanoid robots. The investment exemplifies the firm's thesis: backing world-class founders pursuing a massive market at earliest stages.

Cart.com, an e-commerce infrastructure platform acquired by SoftBank in 2022, represents another transformative exit from the Moonshots Capital portfolio. The company built a comprehensive suite of tools for online sellers, and its acquisition reflected the growing importance of commerce infrastructure at a moment when global e-commerce was accelerating.

SpaceX and Neuralink represent Moonshots Capital's participation in two of the most ambitious aerospace and neurotechnology ventures of the era. Both companies operate at the boundary of what is technically feasible, require extraordinary leadership to execute, and represent decade-long time horizons — precisely the kind of investments the Moonshots Capital partners are equipped to evaluate given their military background in intelligence and long-range strategic planning.

The Angel portfolio, a separate vehicle within the Moonshots Capital structure, has backed 58 companies with 16 exits and 9 unicorns — a remarkable conversion rate that reflects the firm's rigorous selection standards and founder network. Notable Angel portfolio companies include SandboxAQ (AI and quantum simulation) and multiple emerging AI infrastructure companies.

Beyond individual exits and current holdings, the portfolio's diversity demonstrates that Moonshots Capital's thesis is not sector-specific. The common thread across Robinhood, Apptronik, SpaceX, Cart.com, and Slack is the caliber of founding leadership — and that is precisely what the partners screen for above all else.

The single most important criterion at Moonshots Capital is founder quality. The partners evaluate every investment opportunity through the lens of whether the founding team possesses what the firm calls "world-class execution ability" — the combination of technical depth, leadership skill, and market instinct that separates companies that achieve breakout success from those that execute well but miss the market.

Domain expertise is non-negotiable. Moonshots Capital looks for founders who have deep familiarity with the problem they are solving, typically developed through prior professional experience or repeated founder iterations. Founders who discover a market problem and decide to build a solution without prior exposure to that domain face a higher bar, as the firm believes the most successful companies are built by people who have already spent years thinking about and working in the target market.

The partners are explicit about valuing track record. A founder's prior experience building and scaling companies, navigating difficult market conditions, and attracting high-caliber talent carries significant weight in the evaluation process. First-time founders are not excluded — the firm has backed multiple first-time entrepreneurs who demonstrated exceptional execution ability — but the bar is higher and the sourcing network tighter.

Moonshots Capital evaluates market size rigorously, though not through the top-down TAM models that have become standard in pitch decks. The partners prefer to understand the specific customer acquisition dynamics, the path to $100M ARR benchmarks, and whether the market structure supports a winner-take-most outcome. A large but fragmented market with no clear consolidation dynamics is less interesting than a slightly smaller market where the right company can achieve category leadership.

Competitive positioning is assessed with particular attention to durability. The firm looks for companies with defensible advantages — proprietary technology, network effects, exclusive partnerships, brand, or switching costs — that can hold up against well-funded competitors. In a market where AI is lowering the cost of building software, durable moats increasingly require something beyond software alone.

Moonshots Capital's military background shapes how the partners think about team composition under pressure. The firm looks for founding teams with complementary skill sets — particularly the combination of a technical founder who can build and a commercial founder who can sell — and evaluates whether the team dynamic is sustainable through the inevitable challenges of scaling a company.

Moonshots Capital's deal flow is dominated by warm introductions from the firm's existing network — portfolio founders, co-investors, and advisors who know the partners and can vouch for a founder's character and capability. For founders without an existing connection to the network, building a relationship with someone in the Moonshots Capital orbit before pitching is the most reliable path to a meeting.

The firm accepts cold submissions through its website at moonshotscapital.com, though the conversion rate from cold inbound is substantially lower than from warm introductions. Founders pursuing the cold outreach route should ensure their pitch deck clearly articulates why this particular team is uniquely positioned to win in this specific market, rather than leading with market size or traction metrics that are hard to verify at early stages.

The pitch itself should be concise — Moonshots Capital partners see hundreds of decks per year and can usually determine fit within the first few slides. The strongest pitches lead with the problem and the team's qualification to solve it, include specific evidence of early traction or customer validation, and close with a clear description of what the capital will accomplish. Founders who can show early signals of product-market fit — even in small doses — stand out from competitors who are pitching vision alone.

Following up after an initial meeting is expected, but should be substance-driven rather than frequency-driven. Send updates when you have meaningful news — a new customer signing, a key hire, a product milestone — rather than generic progress reports. The partners value founders who use their time efficiently and focus on building rather than managing investor relations.

Moonshots Capital typically makes investment decisions within 2–4 weeks of an initial meeting, though timing varies based on deal complexity and the partners' current bandwidth. Founders should not interpret a delayed decision as a negative signal — the firm often extends due diligence for technically complex investments or companies in markets the partners are still learning.

Even if your current round does not result in an investment, building a long-term relationship with Moonshots Capital can be valuable. The firm is actively investing across multiple funds and market cycles, and a founder who demonstrates exceptional execution in a future context may be exactly the profile the firm is looking for in a subsequent round.

Founders pursuing Moonshots Capital should treat financial preparedness as a competitive advantage. The partners have evaluated thousands of companies and can quickly distinguish founders who understand their unit economics from those who are projecting based on assumptions they have not stress-tested. This differentiation matters in a competitive fundraising environment where seed-stage companies increasingly arrive with similar traction narratives.

Moonshots Capital expects founders to have a clear handle on burn rate, runway, and the path to either profitability or the next financing round. The firm's partners ask detailed questions about capital allocation and want to understand not just what the money will be used for, but what scenarios would change that allocation. Founders who can articulate multiple financial paths — rather than a single optimistic projection — demonstrate the kind of rigorous thinking the partners value.

Working with a fractional CFO is particularly valuable for seed-stage companies that do not yet have a full-time financial executive. Professional financial guidance helps founders build investor-grade financial models, prepare for due diligence with data-room-ready documentation, and develop the narrative around financial performance that complements the pitch deck's traction story.

Our team has helped numerous companies at the seed and Series A stage prepare for the investment process, from building comprehensive financial models to preparing board-level KPI dashboards that demonstrate ongoing progress after a round closes. The same financial infrastructure that impresses investors positions a company to make better internal decisions as it scales.

Key performance indicators are evaluated not just at a point in time but over trends. Moonshots Capital will want to understand the trajectory of your core metrics — customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, net revenue retention, gross margin — and whether those trends suggest a company that can scale efficiently or one that will require disproportionate capital to maintain growth.

Financial projections should be grounded in evidence and stress-tested against downside scenarios. The partners will challenge assumptions, and founders who have already done that work internally will be better positioned to have a productive due diligence conversation.

Whether you are preparing to pitch Moonshots Capital or other top seed-stage investors, professional-grade financial infrastructure can differentiate your company in a competitive process. Our fractional CFO team understands what investors at the seed and Series A stage are evaluating, and we can help you build the financial foundation that makes your company stand out.

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