zipdragon ventures

zipdragon ventures is a San Francisco Bay Area, East Bay, seed-stage investment firm launched in January 2016 by Sheeraz D. Haji to back capital-efficient early-stage SaaS startups sitting at the intersection of digital and climate and sustainability. Haji previously served as CEO of Cleantech Group and co-founded GetActive Software, an early pioneer of SaaS for nonprofits, acquired by Convio, and continues in parallel as a Senior Advisor to ENGIE and a Venture Partner at Rembrandt Venture Partners, giving zipdragon deep operator credibility across both software and cleantech ecosystems. The fund's thesis is 'industry cloud': vertical SaaS, data and applied AI products that digitize legacy industries like clean energy, water, transit, food, real-estate operations and nonprofits. Investments concentrate at pre-seed and seed, with operating leverage rather than scale-at-any-price, and the firm writes the kind of operator checks that lead or co-lead at the earliest stage. zipdragon runs as a small two-to-three-person team, Haji as Managing Partner with Operations Managers Katie Campbell and Melissa Agocs. The portfolio of more than a dozen companies includes Classy in nonprofit fundraising SaaS, Gridium in clean-energy SaaS, Voltaiq in battery analytics, dropcountr in water analytics, Swiftly in transit SaaS, Munchery, FotoNotes, Guidebook and Zerista, plus more recent additions Cala Systems in October 2024 and SiteCapture in January 2025. Past exits include FrontLeaf, acquired by Zuora. By focusing on capital-efficient 'industry cloud' SaaS at the intersection of digital and climate, zipdragon ventures backs founders digitizing legacy industries.