Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Convertible Note,Early stage Venture,Seed,Venture

Jeff Fagnan is a founder and managing partner of Accomplice, the most successful and active early-stage venture capital firm in New England. Jeff is known as a founding investor with a long-term, patient capital approach to building companies alongside mission-oriented founders and CEOs. He is one of the industry’s foremost early-stage investors and has arguably the most comprehensive security portfolio in venture today.

Jeff began his career in venture capital at Seed Capital Partners in 2004, where he focused on commercializing technology out of MIT and Harvard. He joined Atlas Venture’s tech team in 2006 and personally led the charge to reinvent the firm from a dated, struggling brand with 12 global offices to a single headquarters in Cambridge/Boston, MA. He committed to building a thriving tech and venture community in New England when most firms looked westward or refused to reinvent themselves in a contemporary manner. Jeff led this leaner Atlas Venture, raised a new fund through the financial crisis of 2008, and built it into the top early-stage firm on the East Coast, a firm that CB Insights went on to describe in 2014 as “Tom Brady, David Ortiz, and Atlas Venture – the hometown heroes of Boston."

Jeff was the most influential person behind the re-emergence of the Boston tech ecosystem. Over the next 10 years, Jeff pioneered and tweaked the seed-led strategy and has been doing it longer than any other venture firm. In 2015, he co-founded and spun Accomplice out of Atlas as a new firm. Accomplice is now the aspirational venture firm in New England, not through sheer force of capital, but through network, community, and empowerment of entrepreneurs. Dan Primack of Fortune and Axios said in 2017, "When people ask me to name the most important venture capital firm in Boston, my answer is always the same: Accomplice."

Jeff crafted the concept of a venture as an API and strengthened the angel investor substrate in Boston and beyond, creating more open source and community-fueled initiatives than anyone else in the history of the venture. These initiatives include:

Spearhead (founded 2018), fundamentally altering the framework of venture capital scout programs by giving promising founders their own funds and mentorship to start angel investing. Jeff co-founded Spearhead with AngelList’s Naval Ravikant in 2018. Spearhead provides founders with $200k of investable capital to start and up to $1M total. Spearhead cohort one had over 1500 founders apply for a coveted 20 spots. Spearhead is on its second cohort and the leads so far have invested in more than 75 companies.

Maiden Lane (founded 2013), the first online venture fund built on the AngelList platform, backing angels and interesting companies through AngelList's Syndicates product. Maiden Lane co-founders Jeff and Naval Ravikant sourced and diligence all of the syndicate leads and approved all of their individual investments in the portfolio, which included Cruise Automation, earn.com, Sapho, Ticketbis, Branch Metrics, Cabify, Carta, Checkr, ClearTax, Dia&Co, OpenDoor, Poshmark, Postmates, uBiome, Wag, WeFox, and Zymergen.

Boston Syndicates (BOSS) (founded in 2014), is the first syndicate on AngelList and a movement to turn successful founders and operators into serial angel investors and boost angel activity in Boston. BOSS has backed local Boston angels in 60 pre-seed companies since its inception.

Rev Boston (founded 2015), an exclusive network, event, and award for the top 20 female operators in Boston tech to help break down their barriers to entry around angel investing, VC, executive teams, board membership, and founding companies.

TUGG (founded in 2009), is the community engagement platform that connects New England tech entrepreneurs with the riskiest social enterprises serving local under-resourced youth. TUGG has catalyzed over 20 social innovation projects in New England including Resilient Coders, InnerCity Weightlifting, and Catie’s Closet.

Accomplice Blockchain Capital (ABC) (founded in 2018), a separate vehicle for investing in nascent blockchain technologies. The four-person team has invested in over 12 projects including Coda, BisonTrails, Near, and Ontology. The portfolio is valued at 4x despite the recent market correction.

Primack said in 2017 that Jeff and Atlas “have been laser-focused on fostering a local tech ecosystem that badly needed a catalyst. It also has been a major player in terms of local philanthropy, via its creation of TUGG."

Jeff Fagnan graduated from the University of Alaska Anchorage and the University of Rochester.