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THE TEAM

Engineering leaders backing early stage founders

Irregular Expressions, IrregEx for short, is a group of seasoned software engineering and product leaders investing in and advising early stage technology startups.

We’ve spent many cumulative decades bringing high-growth consumer and enterprise products to market, and are driven to help founders scale their own teams, products and businesses faster, by leveraging both our know-how and our network.

Having co-founded, built and scaled hundreds of companies, primarily in the San Francisco, New York, and now remote-first ecosystems, we love working closely with the founders and teams we back, and think through thorny challenges on the product, engineering, and business fronts alike.Proven, passionate operators, bringing many cumulative decades of hard-earned engineering and product lessons to bear, both in reaching investment decisions and helping founders scale their companies, teams, and processes.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS

We should have met yesterday.

We carry mostly founder and operator DNA, so don’t believe in a systemic chasm between founders and investors, or in only seeking each other out at fundraising time. We want to get to know you whether or not you’re raising right now.

Companies are built over many years, and the investors you bring on to support you on that journey will likely be around through most of it: building relationships matters, and the sooner we get to know each other, the better we learn whether we’re a valuable match.

We've built and continue to nurture a deep network of founders, engineering and product heads, academics and follow-on investors. Many of our investments originate from those relationships, and from that shared dedication to building great companies.

INVESTMENT FOCUS

We look to back founders building engines of collective progress.

We’re relentlessly focused on backing companies with defensible technology and product moats, and meaningfully leveraging their data engineering and machine learning expertise to advance industries.

And we’ve long been inspired to take on the problems we face building our own startups, in product and engineering roles. This keeps leading us to two distinct categories of companies:

Engineering Infrastructure

First, systems and platforms transforming the work experience of technologists — whether software engineers, designers, project managers or data scientists — and that in the process make them qualitatively more effective and productive. Technology, applied responsibly, is one of the core drivers of sustainable progress, and equipping those building the future with the best tools powerfully accelerates our journey on that arc. Think Dev Tools, Dev Ops, Engineering and Data Infrastructure, Machine Learning and ML Ops platforms.

Fintech

Second, rather orthogonally, fintech and embedded finance companies. We were lucky enough to work on scaling multiple fintech companies, that illustrated vividly the crucial role of finance in our lives. Just like accelerating the development of technology is a fundamental engine of progress, we believe modernizing our financial infrastructure and expanding access for all to innovative financial services is an essential vector of equity.

HOW WE GET INVOLVED

Once an engineer, always an engineer: we think in systems, whether it’s about refining a recruiting process, a product organization, or a sales playbook.

We’ve worked and continue to work, typically as CTOs, VPs of Engineering or Heads of Product, with amazing teams and co-founders, at many fast growing startups and iconic technology companies.

As such, the group has proven a valuable, specific, both tactical and strategic resource to founders. It doesn’t hurt that everyone’s teams at work are avid consumers and producers of engineering infrastructure.

Engineering and Product Organizations

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of hiring and retaining exceptional people when building astounding technology that meets the needs of a thriving market. Naturally, this extends to equipping those teams with the best tools and practices out there. We love getting specific with:

• Hiring,
• Team development,
• Organizational design,
• Engineering processes,
• Fine-tuning product-market fit,
• Avoiding scope creep.

Growth

Building it doesn’t mean they will come, not without a repeatable playbook to acquire and retain customers. Whether it’s product-led growth, top-down or bottom-up, your go-to-market strategy is ultimately what propels the company, or stalls it. While we’re first and foremost nerds of the engineering kind, we’re closely tied to a deep network of specialists whose collective experience translates into actionable tactics in most configurations.

Ecosystem

Ultimately, one of the most powerful reasons we specialize so narrowly is to nurture an ecosystem of investors, customers, partners and acquirers truly valuable as you grow the company. We help you connect with two main ecosystems: engineering and product leaders, and fintech practitioners.

As startup co-founders and engineering leaders, with proven track-records scaling businesses and engineering teams alike, we've formed and continue to nurture a deep network of like-minded founders, engineering and product heads, researchers and investors, all passionate about starting, fueling, and growing meaningful, high-impact technology companies. Our opportunities originate from those relationships, and from that shared dedication to building great .