Here are some of the companies I advise, back, and participate as a board member. I really enjoy early stage when the path isn’t clear. And I’ve had the most fun surprising the world with mass consumer adoption campaigns.
Invest alongside Capital Factory & Umami Capital.
Following my windup at Whym, I spent time with Bright Ventures, M13 + Alpaca VC exploring agentic solutions in the consumer market and serving as a GTM advisor for their portfolio companies.
I meet new founders through my personal network, Techstars affiliation and Snap alumni. This list doesn’t include the founders I meet via several AngelList syndicates or monthly updates I receive from friendly funds.
As the founder and CEO at Whym, I received strong support from venture capitalists and institutional angels in prominent tech hubs including Silicon Valley, New York, London and Los Angeles.
I write angel checks into consumer hardware, AI and commerce at the earliest stages. My current positions include Apptronik, the company behind the Apollo humanoid robot; Loops, a commerce orchestration layer backed by a16z speedrun; and In-seam, a luxury retail platform for personal stylists. I am currently at 13x MOIC, and I invest alongside Capital Factory and Umami Capital. Founders usually take me on for the go-to-market help as much as the check.
I'm one of them — I'm an individual angel investor in Apptronik, the company building the Apollo humanoid robot, which has raised just under $1B in total including a $350M Series A. I invested because I've spent twenty years commercializing anthropomorphic hardware for consumers: a droid sold through Apple and Disney at Sphero, a flying robot at Parrot, and vending robots as the physical point of sale at Snap.
Someone who has put a robot on a shelf and sold it to households, not a pilot customer. That is a small group, because most robotics operators come from industrial or enterprise markets and most consumer go-to-market people have never run a hardware channel. I have shipped a million consumer robots into homes with BB-8, created the consumer drone category with the Parrot AR.Drone, and used physical robots as the retail channel itself with the Snapbots. I take this work on retainer or as a fractional executive — hi@kellyny.land.