Project Ventures, the solo GP firm founded by Shahryar Barati, has reached a £1.2m first close on its maiden fund. The vehicle will write pre-seed and seed cheques into AI and deep tech companies emerging from the Imperial College London ecosystem.
Barati is a three-time Imperial alumnus who co-founded and ran a technology startup before building an automated venture investment platform and working across financial institutions. Project Ventures is his first fund as a general partner, and he is running it alone.
The strategy is narrow by design. The firm invests at what it calls the intersection of deep tech and AI, backing founders from the Imperial community and its connected networks who are applying frontier science and engineering to hardware and software with defensible intellectual property. Target companies are at pre-seed and seed, the stage where university spinouts typically struggle to assemble a first institutional round.
A £1.2m first close is small in absolute terms and says more about the structure of the UK's emerging manager market than about the opportunity. Solo GP funds have multiplied in Britain over the past two years, but first-time managers without an institutional anchor generally close in tranches, deploying from an initial pool while continuing to raise. The total fund target, cheque size and limited partner base were not disclosed.
The university-adjacent angle matters for cap tables. Imperial is one of the UK's most prolific generators of science and engineering spinouts, and equity in those companies is contested at formation: the institution's technology transfer office, founding academics and early angels all take positions before an institutional investor arrives. A fund built explicitly around one university's pipeline is buying proximity to that deal flow, and access at the point where ownership is still being set.
The constraint is concentration. A first close of this size supports a small number of positions, with limited reserves for follow-ons, meaning the fund will be diluted in later rounds unless subsequent closes materially increase the pool. Whether Project Ventures can hold its stakes through Series A will depend on how much more it raises, and how quickly.
Original source: Sifted — https://sifted.eu/articles/new-solo-gp-firm-backing-early-stage-ai-and-deeptech-startups-hits-first-close-of-maiden-fund/
