The company offers tech talent recruiting and has also made over 100 investments in startups
The team at Unmatched Ventures has a keen eye for talent and they are using their executive search platform to spot their next investment.
The Los Angeles firm is in the process of raising up to $100 million to invest in early-stage hardware companies by year-end. Unmatched Ventures founding partners include Todd Gitlin, who founded Safire Partners in 2006. He is working with Aaron Zeeb, Holly Rockwell, Simon Casuto and Shaina Semiatin, who each have backgrounds working with major Southern California tech companies. The fund formalizes and expands Safire Partners’ pre-existing deal structure that has made approximately 100 investments in startups over the past two decades, where it trades fees for company equity. It has had about 20 successful exits from companies that include HauteLook, TrueCar and Rubicon Project.
“We’re still ultimately an executive search firm, but our goal as investors is to do business with those with whom we have high levels of conviction,” said Aaron Zeeb, partner. “Deferring fees and becoming equity holders aligns the incentive structure.”
The firm seeks investments in Series A to C growth-stage companies that work in aerospace and defense, alternative energy, robotics and automation, and advanced manufacturing. It has several financial options for executive searches, including straight fees based on an annual compensation, but the goal is to take equity either directly or through a hybrid model featuring discounted fees and/or rights to invest in future funding rounds. Unmatched Ventures has built a pipeline of future deals and is now seeking capital to pair those investments with its executive search, advisory and proprietary data on real-time company and talent movement.
Zeeb has a background building teams and scaling companies. He joined SpaceX in 2008 and served as a head of talent acquisition. During his tenure, the company grew from about 300 employees to about 4,500 before he left to join Safire Partners in 2014. Rockwell’s background includes SpaceX, Snap, Honey and Relativity Space.
Southern California has a strong pipeline for talent, featuring more than 100 universities with top engineering programs, like California Institute of Technology, UCLA and USC, among others. Zeeb said that one of the biggest challenges was that 70% of graduates were leaving the region for jobs with tech companies in Seattle, the Bay Area and other places with more established companies and a stronger network of spinoffs and startups as far back as the early 2000s.
The growth of SpaceX, along with other major tech employers such as Snap, built an ecosystem of seed-stage companies, but many smaller organizations couldn’t afford traditional fees for recruiting, making it difficult to convince employees that the Southern California economy could support career growth for engineers.
Gradually, the ecosystem grew and more venture capital began investing in the area. Those larger firms brought credibility and experience, but could potentially push smaller partners out of deals for top companies. This is how Unmatched Ventures seeks to differentiate itself from other smaller funds.
“We’re experimenting with the model and we’re not trying to displace larger partners. We can give access to our recruiting services to portfolio companies and less of their investment will go to fees because we’re involved,” said Zeeb.
-David Nusbaum
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