Lofty Ventures

Lofty Ventures is a growing community of Chicago’s most passionate founders building our city’s next generation of disruptive startups. Our founders are all bounded by a common thread, amazing people with vision and purpose. We’re laser focused on finding the best founders in Chicago and giving them all the resources necessary to be successful entrepreneurs, dynamic business leaders and exceptional people. Lofty’s growing family of over 100 founders leading 64 startups collaborate and support one another throughout their entrepreneurial careers. Our strength is building community and fostering relationships with one another, the broader Chicago community and the global tech ecosystem. Lofty Ventures is not a venture capital firm and we don’t manage other people’s money. We invest our own capital, which enables us to move quickly and take calculated risks that most VCs can’t. We like to invest as early as possible and add value right away by introducing potential investors, customers, advisors, directors, and team members. We typically invest from first-check to seed and deploy $10k to $100k, with rare instances of follow on. Our sweet spot is $2M to $4M pre-money valuations (or caps), we’re industry agnostic but look for tech enabled businesses that are Chicago-based (or have a strong strategic tie to the city). Through our annual “Invest It Forward” program, our founders work together to select a local Chicago nonprofit that we collectively support through a $10k grant (provided by Lofty, no cost to our founders), and mentoring and volunteering opportunities (all activities are optional). We believe that people that pay it forward get 10x back of whatever they invest, so we make it as easy and frictionless as possible for our founders to get involved in our local community. If you’d like to explore joining the Lofty family, then we would encourage getting an intro via a mutual connection...and please do your homework on Lofty first.