Team Builder Ventures

Team Builder Ventures is a San Francisco-based 'service' venture capital fund founded in 2013 by Steven Lurie, a former Zynga executive who served on the company's executive staff from its early days through its IPO, where he was the first Head of Mobile, built the India team and ran International, earning Zynga's Spirit and Atlas Awards. The fund's core differentiator is hands-on team-building: it commits to helping portfolio founders recruit world-class talent at no recruiting fee, reaching candidates that traditional recruiters and even founders cannot, and has beaten top recruiting firms on hires for its companies. It invests in pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds, explicitly does not lead rounds and does not require board seats, instead participating alongside larger lead VC funds, which makes it easy to include in early-stage rounds. Checks average about $250K, typically $100K to $500K and somewhat larger for Series A, and the firm manages under $150M across three private funds. Team Builder Ventures invests across domains and geographies, spanning enterprise and SMB software, developer tools, hardware, media and content, social networks, e-commerce, marketplaces, SaaS and fintech. Its portfolio of roughly 34 companies includes one unicorn and twelve acquisitions, with notable holdings such as Zuora, Tonal, Humanity, Arch Systems, AngelList and Orbit Fab. Its most recent tracked investment was in TrueTax in early 2025. By making recruiting its signature value-add and deliberately co-investing alongside lead funds, Team Builder Ventures positions itself as an easy-to-include early-stage partner focused on helping founders build their teams.