Expanding Our Investment Focus

What If Ventures experienced tremendous growth in 2024 as we eclipsed the $100mm AUM mark as a firm. This post includes a brief update on our progress, and our expansion into other verticals. To date, we’ve been very focused on healthcare, and going forward we are going to expand that mantra to HEALTH AND FREEDOM.

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Since inception, What If Ventures has deployed $100mm+ into 86 startups with a significant concentration in healthcare. Our original mission, based on my personal sobriety journey, was to invest in mental health startups. That led to opportunities to invest in healthcare more broadly over the years and we’ve done just that.

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As we’ve had access to more capital, and built more relationships in the venture community I’ve wanted to expand into other verticals. One logical vertical for me is Defense and Industrial technology.

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Why?

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I am a United States Military Academy at West Point graduate for one, and I served in the Army as an infantry officer after college. After business school, I spent 7 years as an investment banker covering the Aerospace & Defense sector at UBS, then at J.P. Morgan in NYC.

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This experience and the relationships I built during those years have led to very interesting defense tech startup deal flow, and an ability to leverage my relationships to help those startups both with the DoD and with the Primes (who were my former clients as a banker).

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In the last 6 months What If Ventures has invested in a handful of defense tech startups. These companies so far include Umbra, Firehawk, Raven Space Systems, Aeon and Samara Aerospace.

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I believe that we are entering a new age in America and globally. The United States has seen a large portion of industrial manufacturing outsourced to other parts of the world. This manufacturing base is / was the cornerstone of our defense industrial base.

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As manufacturing has moved offshore, we have put ourselves in a position to experience supply chain shortages all across the defense and industrial landscape. We are seeing shortages in munitions, machinery, weapons, supplies, fuel, and many other components.

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These shortages have been experienced while we simply supply our allies for their fights. Imagine where we would be if we were engaged in a full-scale conflict today.

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The American government, the United States Department of Defense, and other agencies have made it a priority to foster American ingenuity to build new technologies, new capabilities and expand manufacturing capacity here in America to support dual-use missions. And we are going to invest heavily in this over the coming years.

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By leveraging my military experience, the relationships I’ve built over many years and my working knowledge of the defense landscape, we will invest in the technologies and capabilities that bring about a new era of American readiness, dynamism and industrial defense capability.