1517 Fund

1517 Fund is a venture capital firm and community that supports college dropouts, renegade students, and deep tech scientists with investments at the earliest stages of their companies. Founded in 2015 by Danielle Strachman and Michael Gibson, who were both part of the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship, the fund aims to extend the support already granted by the Fellowship. It targets 'dropouts, renegade students, and deep tech scientists' and is backed by Peter Thiel. The fund provides cash grants and investments, focusing on software, hardware, and deep tech verticals.

The firm's investment strategy includes making initial investments in startups from the R&D/idea phase up through the Seed phase. They prefer to back founders without undergraduate degrees and those working on deep tech or sci-fi technologies. Their first checks range from $50,000 at the idea/R&D stage to $1,000,000 for deep tech/sci-fi seed stage companies, with an average check size of $400,000 for pre-seed investments.

1517 Fund has a track record of being the first institutional investor in several notable companies, including Luminar Technologies, Loom, nTop, and Cents. Their portfolio spans various sectors, including LiDAR for autonomy, asynchronous video SaaS, deep learning cloud and hardware, neutral atom quantum computing, and next-generation engineering design SaaS, among others.