Fitz Gate Ventures

Fitz Gate Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm founded in July 2015 by Jim Cohen and Mark Poag, headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey with an additional presence in Houston, Texas. The firm manages $70 million in assets under management and is currently investing out of its third fund, launched in December 2025. Both general partners teach venture capital investing at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business and Princeton University's Graduate School, giving the firm deep roots in two of North America's leading research university ecosystems. Fitz Gate writes initial checks of $500,000 to $2 million and leads rounds across pre-seed, seed, and Series A stages. The firm has made 26 tracked investments with concentration in AI and deep tech, software, SaaS, hardware and robotics. While the third fund is generalist in approach, it carries a sub-focus on deep tech and hard tech, areas where the Princeton University pipeline provides a particularly strong flow of opportunities. The firm has raised three successive funds: Fund I in 2015, Fund II in 2020, and Fund III in late 2025. Fitz Gate's primary competitive advantage is its proprietary 'Friends of Fitz' network, a community of hundreds of venture capitalists, startup founders, university professors, and senior executives concentrated in the New York and Texas ecosystems. The majority of capital flows to startups connected to the Princeton University ecosystem, and the firm brings both academic rigor and practitioner experience to every board seat it holds.