What happened
Vanessa Larco, a partner at venture capital firm NEA for nearly eight years, co-founded Premise VC in early 2025 with Mercedes Bent to focus exclusively on pre-seed and seed stage investments. The firm writes checks ranging from $500,000 to $3 million.
Why it matters
Larco argues that founder preferences have shifted away from mega-funds toward specialized early-stage investors who treat founders as top priority. The Silicon Valley Bank collapse revealed which VCs prioritized their portfolio companies during crisis, changing how founders evaluate investors. Premise is designed to capitalize on this shift by making founders' success—not fund deployment targets—the central mission.
What to watch
Larco evaluates founders on seven core attributes and looks for those world-class in at least two of them. She focuses on teams that use AI to make products dramatically faster, cheaper, or easier—not merely wrapping existing APIs—and cities where she has strong networks: San Francisco, New York, and Atlanta.
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Larco's departure from NEA reflects a structural shift in how early-stage founders choose investors. At mega-funds managing billions of dollars, a $2 million check is mathematically insignificant relative to deployment targets, making it impossible for those firms to treat pre-seed and seed companies as top priority. The Silicon Valley Bank collapse in 2023 made this gap visible: founders watched which investors answered the phone when cash was hours away from running out. Those who were deprioritized learned a hard lesson about fund size versus commitment, spreading the story through WhatsApp channels and founder communities faster than ever before.
This shift has allowed emerging and specialized funds to win competitive deal flow against established mega-funds—a dynamic that was virtually unheard of before. Larco's insight was to convert this change into a business model. Rather than accept that mega-fund structure forces trade-offs, Premise VC is designed from the ground up to make early-stage founder success the primary metric, with check sizes intentionally sized to matter to the fund's allocation strategy. She validated this thesis by conducting a listening tour with early-stage founders, asking what they actually needed rather than assuming VC best practices.
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