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Grow without limits.

Capital and predictable market validation for Black founders.

In the early days of your company, it's critical to find the smartest path to validate that you are building what your customer wants. We help early-stage founders quickly validate their products or services. Reach out at build@uncap.vc

Invention is not innovation.

We help you innovate across all ten pillars of innovation.

Profit Model
How do you make money?
Network
How is your business connected?
Structure
How do you organize your people?
Process
What processes do you follow?
Product Performance
What are your distinguishing features?
Product System
What are your complementary products?
Service
How does your support retain customers?
Channel
Where do you deliver your offering?
Brand
How do you represent your business?
Customer Engagement
What distinct interactions do you facilitate?

The Founders

Arif Gursel

Arif Gursel

Business development professional and technologist. Former Netflix and YouTube executive.

LaSean Smith

LaSean Smith

Author of Values-Based Business Design. Former Amazon and Microsoft executive.


Our Story

We started Unified to help founders get through the early stage of their growth cycle in a more predictable fashion. We've been investing for years and have operating experience at Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Salesforce, and a wide range of startups.

Startups in our portfolio receive marketing and product design services that accelerate their market validation. This approach helps founders move with more clarity, purpose, and speed.

Unified provides capital and services to seed-stage startups led by results-driven founding teams with at least one Black founder. To be considered, a startup must have a defensible growth model, scalable product or service, and significant total addressable market. In addition, founders must be able to articulate why their team will be able to actualize their vision. Why has the founding team decided to solve this problem and not something else? Why aren't others solving this problem? Why are customers looking to pay with their time or money to solve this problem now? This includes why critical growth will appear at the right time for their product or service to win. This timing insight may come in the form of a customer behavior shift, regulatory change, new distribution channel, or new enabling technology. We provide office hours to help founders still working through their answers to these questions. We're successful when founders need less capital to reach market validation and unlock the right capital when they're ready to grow.

Our Service Model

01

North Star Development

Craft your founder's letter to answer why the business exists.

02

Design Sprints

Define your winning strategy—including your unfair advantage.

03

Earlier Customer Engagement

Validate your customer market through real customer engagement.

If our approach sounds interesting for what you're building, we would love to talk: build@uncap.vc