First Star Ventures invests in visionary, technical founders at the pre-seed stage who are developing frontier computing technologies, including AI, machine learning, decentralization, edge computing, and techbio, to transform massive industries. They focus on companies with the potential for rapid growth and defensible technology, prioritizing teams and technologies over existing traction.
About First Star Ventures
First Star Ventures is an early-stage venture firm with a thesis emphasizing technical and deep tech investments. The firststar.vc website and the firm’s social presence point to a generalist deep tech mandate rather than a defined healthcare practice, but the firm has historically been comfortable with frontier technology including life sciences-adjacent tools and computational platforms. For healthcare AI founders, First Star is a plausible fit only if your business has serious technical defensibility: foundation models for biology, novel medical imaging architectures, computational chemistry, or AI infrastructure with healthcare as a primary application. Founders building digital health apps, telehealth, or healthcare services with light AI features should look elsewhere; the firm rewards technical depth, not vertical SaaS execution. Plausible check sizes run 500K to 2M at seed, with selective follow-on. Founders should expect technically substantive diligence: the partners will want to understand your architecture, training data provenance, and why your approach is durable against well-resourced competitors. Entry path is LinkedIn outreach to partners with a one-paragraph technical positioning, or warm introduction through deep tech operators and academic labs in their network. The firm participates in technical conferences and reads inbound; cold outreach can work if the pitch is technically credible from the first sentence. Bring your technical co-founder to the first meeting. Do not pitch market size and growth metrics first; pitch the technical wedge, the data moat, and the science. If your story is fundamentally a go-to-market story rather than a technical one, this is not the right fund for you.
Founder reviews
Healthcare AI tools backed by First Star Ventures
Tools made by companies in First Star Ventures's portfolio that we cover in the directory.
Portfolio companies in our directory
Other portfolio companies
Companies in First Star Ventures's portfolio not currently in our directory.
- Zanskar
- PlusOne Robotics
- Oort
- Swiftly
- iOrganBio
- Romix Biosciences
- Enzymit
- Seven Bridges Genomics
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