Starting Line VC
Starting Line is a Chicago-based early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2018 by Ezra Galston that invests first checks into consumer technology startups nationwide. The firm concentrates on consumer AI, consumer health and longevity, Gen Alpha / Gen Z, consumer mobile, consumer fintech, and consumer marketplaces — as well as the infrastructure that supports them. Starting Line typically writes first checks of $500K-$1.5M (optimally $750K-$1.25M into a ~$2.5M seed round), maintains a roughly 2:1 initial-to-reserves ratio, and makes about 6-8 new investments per year. It has raised three funds — Fund I ($17M, 2018), Fund II ($30M, 2021), and Fund III ($30M, 2023) — and is headquartered in Chicago with portfolio concentrations in Los Angeles, Austin, and New York. The firm is known for radical transparency, open-sourcing its operating manual, quarterly LP letters, and mental health policy on GitHub. Notable investments include Cameo, M1 Finance, Substack, Hungryroot, Shef, Soona, SpotHero (acquired by Uber), and Pretty Litter (acquired by Mars for ~$1B).
Starting Line VC is tracked in the API Evangelist network. This page is the human-readable profile that sits on top of the machine-readable index we maintain at apis.io.
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Starting Line VC is in the network as a tracked entity. We haven't yet indexed a public API surface for it — when one is published, the artifacts, score, and agent-readiness read will appear here automatically. The source repository is where that profile is built.
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