We founded Pioneer in 2018 on a mission to find & fund the world’s creative, ambitious outsiders. Earlier this year, we made our final investment.
Over the past 6 years, we built a community of 300+ founders in 50+ countries. We invested in 150+ companies collectively worth over $1B. Tens of thousands of founders across nearly every country on Earth used the Pioneer Tournament to share 60,000+ progress updates with each other, and exchanged 600,000+ pieces of feedback.
Pioneer has had two core theses from day one:
- There are countless brilliant outsiders around the world who could build great companies, but just don’t have the right network, environment, or credentials to do so.
- Software can find them.
While we still firmly believe in our theses, we’ve decided to stop pursuing this goal. We’ll continue to support our founder community for years to come, of course!
Finally, a huge thank you to all of our supporters. Hundreds of investors, advisors, founders, and operators in our broader network worked with Pioneers over the years to maximize their odds of success, and we are grateful for your help!
P.S. Many founders we’ve reached out to have asked us how we discovered their startups—especially ones in stealth. We built a number of mechanisms to prove our ideas, using everything from experimental tests and gamification to mass web scraping and novel ML techniques. In 2022, we launched an ML-powered pipeline that consistently scraped every website on the Internet. If you’re curious about this final iteration of Pioneer, check out this deep dive into our software.