Lofty Ventures

Lofty Ventures is a growing community of Chicago’s most passionate founders building our city’s next generation of disruptive startups, and the angel investors who back them. Our founders and investors are all bounded by a common thread, amazing people with vision and purpose. We’re laser focused on finding the best founders in Chicago and giving them all the resources necessary to be successful entrepreneurs, dynamic business leaders and exceptional people. Lofty’s growing family of 180 founders leading 100 startups collaborate and support one another throughout their entrepreneurial journeys. Our strength is building community and fostering relationships with one another, the broader Chicago community and the global tech ecosystem. Lofty Angels is over 300 investors strong and growing. We provide educational programming and investment opportunities for accredited investors who want to excel at early-stage investing. We also enable Lofty founders to become angel investors earlier in their career to: 1) become more savvy founders by understanding how investors think, 2) build diversification & hedge their risk, and 3) gain investing experience/reps early so they can write first-checks right when they exit. Lofty Ventures is not a venture capital firm, and although we don’t manage other people’s money, we do maintain a syndicate for our angel community. We like to invest as early as possible and add value right away by introducing potential investors, customers, advisors, directors, and team members. We typically invest from first-check to seed and deploy $10k to $100k initially, with potential for $100k to $500k in follow-on investment via our syndicate. Our post-money valuation (or cap) sweet spot is $3M to $5M pre-money, we’re industry agnostic but look for Chicago-based, tech enabled businesses. Our founders are exemplified by the following: 1) are givers (in Adam Grant's "Give & Take" sense), 2) brilliant, 3) scrappy/gritty, and 4) have problem-founder-fit.