Overview

We're Ireland's only dedicated and privately backed pre-seed fund, investing €100,000 as first cheque investors into pre-seed companies building AI native SaaS, with a bias towards intelligent automation, and infrastructure for execution-heavy or regulation-heavy environments.

We believe that founders in Ireland increase their chances of longer term success if they raise their first round of capital from investors who are primarily based outside of Ireland. It usually means that founders raise a better round, on better terms, from investors with a deeper bench of capabilities, expertise, and network.

Community First, Capital Second

Baseline didn't start as a fund searching for deals. We spent over a year building the infrastructure first: a community of founders who learn from each other, a founder-only workspace in Dublin, regular deep dives and sessions, and an bi-annual retreats connecting Irish founders with founders and investors from across Europe.

The community revealed the opportunity. We kept meeting great technical and commercial founders building very cool stuff, but who also made it clear they weren't hanging around for things to happen. They demonstrated their ability to repeatedly get in front of leaders in their target market and get them do to make decisions. We formalised capital to back the founders we were already watching closely, and more like them.

What We Look For

Technical founders building AI-native SaaS, intelligent automation, and infrastructure for execution-heavy or regulation-heavy environments. We're sector-agnostic within this thesis. Ultimately we invest in people and behaviours, because at pre-seed everything is variable and subject to change: product, go to market, pricing, etc. Founders, and their behaviours are constant, however. We look for people who are able to build velocity, and make things happen in a relatively short period of time. We are fine investing pre-revenue, or even pre-product.

How to Successfully Raise from Baseline

• We're very easy to get in touch with, you can email us fund@baseline.community, you can ask one of our members or portfolio founders to make an introduction, you can come to one of the many events we host or organise, or you can literally walk into Baseline and ask for us
• Read these two posts about your deck, and meeting investors
• Plan on running a 4-6 week process to get your round done, talk to us or any of our portfolio companies before you do so to learn how to put the process together in a way that gets you back to building and talking to customers sooner
• Demonstrate that you can make things happen