Core Ventures
VC Fund
Santa Clara, United States
Core Ventures is a VC fund in Santa Clara focused on Software and Artificial Intelligence. Core Ventures strives to find and support founders of character and integrity. They primarily invest in seed stage b2b companies with advanced technological capabilities. They invest in relatively few companies and work as closely as possible with the founders to support the company in any area it needs.
- Total investments:
- 33
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 3%
- Fund size:
- $25M
- Last fund:
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Core Ventures invests in
Stages Core Ventures invests in
Countries Core Ventures invests in
Round sizes
Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
Round size
- Seed
- $1.7M–$9M
- Series A
- $3M–$55M
Investment Focus
Industry
- Software 14 (42%)
- Artificial Intelligence 9 (27%)
- SaaS 4 (12%)
- Analytics 4 (12%)
- Machine Learning 4 (12%)
Stage
- Seed 20 (61%)
- Series A 9 (27%)
- Pre-Seed 1 (3%)
- Venture - Series Unknown 1 (3%)
Country
- United States 22 (67%)
- Canada 1 (3%)
- Mexico 1 (3%)
- Germany 1 (3%)
- Singapore 1 (3%)
Team
| Name | Title | Investments | Links | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Joanna Drake Earl
General Partner
|
General Partner | Total investments: 10 | Find email | |
Marie Drez
CFO
|
CFO | Total investments: 0 | Find email |
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backpack Payment Technologies, Inc. is a financial technology company that specializes in building API-driven payment gateways for 529 College Savings Plans. The company collaborates with OMB Bank, a Member FDIC, to provide banking services. Backpack focuses on simplifying the process of managing and contributing to 529 accounts, making it easierfor families to save for education expenses. The platform integrates various financial services to offer a seamless user experience for its clients. | $9M / Seed / May 01, 2026 | ||
| Pell Network is a precisely constructed multi-layered restaking network with a great user experience, clear role segregation, and a closed-loop business logic chain. | $3.5M / Seed / Jan 28, 2025 | ||
| Bitcoin isn’t just digital gold—it’s the new foundational layer of capital markets. Hamilton leverages Bitcoin’s unmatched security and decentralization to tokenize real-world assets (RWA), providing global access to institutional-grade financial products. | $1.7M / Pre-Seed / Jan 20, 2025 | ||
| Friendly Apps is to create a suite of apps with a different set of values that are targeted toward helping people with both their physical and mental health in new ways. | $3M / Seed / May 26, 2022 | ||
| Concentric’s Semantic Intelligence solution delivers data risk insights across the entire inventory of sensitive documents in the cloud and on-premises. Its deep learning technology examines each document’s content and context for efficient actionable security. It scans the documents, identifies sensitive or business-critical data, evaluates therisk each document poses, and highlights critical concerns that need immediate attention. The company was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in San Jose, California. | $14.5M / Series A / May 11, 2022 | ||
| Space Runners is a unique digital sneaker brand in the NFT space, focusing on NFT footwear, which is easy to interact with beyond the fashion-forward designs. The company is advancing with a vision to unlock the "apparel" category in the NFT world by providing the most immersive digital sneaker experience yet. It brings togetherfashion-forward designers, fashion houses, top celebrities and crypto communities to create the “Wear2Earn ecosystem.”The company has recently announce partnership with 2 NBA top stars, Zion Williamson and Kyle Kuzma, to release their NFT shoe brands. Beyond their unique designs, every NFT will be wearable by AR and social media filters while the company will also embed them to metaverses.The ultimate goal of the company is to become the first and the biggest virtual apparel brand which provides unique designs with solid utilities. | $10M / Seed / Mar 07, 2022 | ||
| Zigazoo is a rapidly growing social media brand featuring the recently launched Generation Z-focused Zigazoo app and Zigazoo Kids, which launched in 2020 and has since become the world’s largest social network for Generation Alpha. Zigazoo makes screentime healthier, safer and more creative. The video-first apps have empowered millions to expresstheir authentic selves within a positive social media environment and has become a priority destination for top tier creator talent, celebrities, and best-in-class brands including the NBA, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Amazon, Apple TV+, Netflix, and WWE.Since launch in 2020, Zigazoo has been backed by the NBA, Liberty City Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Causeway Media Partners, Serena Ventures, Talis Capital, Wheelhouse Entertainment, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Charli & Dixie D’Amelio, and Jimmy Kimmel, and many more tech and entertainment heavyweights. | Seed / Feb 06, 2022 | ||
| Ockam builds #OSS developer-first tools for end-to-end encrypted messaging between distributed applications, in any environment, anywhere... Trust for Data-in-Motion. | $12.5M / Series A / Jan 05, 2022 | ||
| AskBrain uses narrow AI technologies to build products that connect humans with services and information via natural language. Brian, the AI assistant, communicates via email and performs time-consuming tasks that reflect the needs of management consultants and similar knowledge workers. Brian empowers users to focus on high-value activities bytaking care of tedious ones such as document translation (100 languages), file conversion, industry benchmarks, country research, presentation graphics, and many more. | Seed / Jul 06, 2021 | ||
| Compaas helps growing companies make smarter decisions around compensation, communicate better with their employees, and avoid mistakes.It offers a Compensation Intelligence Platform that helps companies manage their operating expense: employee compensation. The platform provides compensation analytics and strategy tools for startups andenterprise companies.In 2017, Lisa Dusseault and Bethanye Blount founded the company in San Francisco, California. | $4.3M / Seed / Aug 11, 2020 | ||
| See all 33 investments → | |||
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FAQ
What does Core Ventures invest in?
Core Ventures invests primarily in Software, Artificial Intelligence and SaaS startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 33 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
What round sizes does Core Ventures invest in?
Core Ventures typically joins rounds of $1.7M–$9M at Seed and $3M–$55M at Series A. These are whole funding-round sizes, not Core Ventures's own check, which is rarely disclosed: the 10th–90th percentile of the confirmed public funding rounds Core Ventures took part in.
How do I contact Core Ventures?
Public channels for Core Ventures include LinkedIn and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
Who are the partners at Core Ventures?
The team at Core Ventures includes Joanna Drake Earl (General Partner) and Marie Drez (CFO). The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Oct 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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