Micah Rosenbloom

Micah Rosenbloom is an American venture capitalist and three-time founder. He is a co-founder and general partner of Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York that has backed 24 startups valued at over $1 billion, including Uber, Coupang, The Trade Desk, and Airtable^[1][4].

Before entering venture capital, Rosenbloom co-founded three companies, including Brontes Technologies, a dental imaging startup that he built as COO and sold to 3M for $95 million in 2006^[3]. He leads Founder Collective's New York office and has personally led seed investments in Verkada, Plated, Periscope, Talos, and Lovevery^[1].

Rosenbloom teaches "Thinking Like a VC," a popular elective at Cornell Tech, and has written for Harvard Business Review and TechCrunch on capital efficiency and founder-investor dynamics^[2][5].

Rosenbloom attended Cornell University from 1994 to 1998, earning a bachelor's degree in industrial and labor relations^[2].

After college, his first job was as a mail clerk at Endeavor, the Hollywood talent agency that later inspired HBO's Entourage. He has said the experience taught him that agents and producers often "lost their empathy for the talent" and that the entertainment business was "simply a business" to most of the people running it^[7].

He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2003, where he was classmates with Eric Paley and David Frankel — both of whom would become his co-founders at Brontes Technologies and, later, Founder Collective^[3][12].

Handshake.com (1999–2001)

Before business school, Rosenbloom co-founded Handshake.com, an enterprise software company that built online scheduling and pricing engines. The company raised over $20 million from venture and strategic investors^[1].

Brontes Technologies (2003–2006)

While at Harvard Business School, Rosenbloom and classmate Eric Paley connected with MIT professor Douglas Hart and former postdoc Janos Rohaly, who had developed a handheld 3D oral scanner capable of capturing digital dental impressions in real time — replacing the traditional putty molds used in dentistry for over a century^[3].

Rosenbloom served as COO and Paley as CEO. The company was named after a mythological Cyclops, referencing its single-lens design. Brontes received seed funding from MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation — at the time, the largest grant the center had awarded — with additional backing from Bain Capital, Charles River Ventures, and Flybridge Capital Partners^[3].

3M acquired Brontes in October 2006 for $95 million. The technology launched as the Lava Chairside Oral Scanner in 2008, later rebranded as the 3M True Definition Scanner. By 2013, the device had exceeded 100,000 clinical uses^[3].

Sample6 Technologies

Rosenbloom co-founded Sample6, a Boston-based biotech company that built a diagnostic platform for detecting harmful bacteria in food and healthcare settings. The company was acquired by IEH^[1].

Founder Collective (2009–present)

In May 2009, Rosenbloom co-founded Founder Collective with Eric Paley and David Frankel. The firm's founding thesis was to build "the kind of venture capital fund they wished had existed when starting their own companies" — a seed-stage fund where every full-time investor was a successful founder first^[4].

The original founding group included part-time "founder-partners" Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr), Chris Dixon (co-founder of Hunch, now an Andreessen Horowitz partner), and Zach Klein (co-founder of CollegeHumor and Vimeo)^[8].

Founder Collective has intentionally kept its fund sizes below $100 million — a deliberate constraint in an industry trending toward multi-billion-dollar vehicles. The firm's five funds have ranged from $40 million (Fund I, 2009) to $95 million (Fund V, 2023)^[4][8].

As of 2025, Founder Collective has seeded 24 companies that reached valuations above $1 billion, completed over 130 acquisitions, and participated in 10 IPOs. The portfolio includes Uber, Coupang (which debuted at an $84 billion valuation in 2021), The Trade Desk, PillPack (acquired by Amazon), Cruise (acquired by General Motors), and Airtable^[4].

Rosenbloom leads the firm's New York office in SoHo. Since January 2024, he has also served as a visiting lecturer at Cornell Tech, where he teaches an elective called "Thinking Like a VC"^[2].

Rosenbloom has personally led Founder Collective's seed investments in a range of companies across security, consumer, fintech, and enterprise software^[1].

Selected investments include:

• Verkada — physical security and camera platform, valued at $5.8 billion as of December 2025
• Plated — meal kit delivery service, where Rosenbloom served on the board from 2013 to 2015. Acquired by Albertsons for an estimated $175–200 million in 2017^[11]
• Periscope — live-streaming video app, acquired by Twitter for approximately $100 million in 2015
• Talos — institutional digital asset trading infrastructure, valued at $1.25 billion
• Lovevery — developmental learning toys for children
• Levels — metabolic health and continuous glucose monitoring
• Tropic — AI-powered procurement intelligence platform

The firm's investment approach is "proudly anti-thematic" — sector-agnostic with a focus on founders rather than market categories. Typical check sizes range from $400,000 to $2 million, with a sweet spot around $1 million^[6].

In 2025, Rosenbloom was ranked #20 on Business Insider's The Seed 100, a list of the top seed-stage venture investors^[1]. His co-founder David Frankel was ranked #2 on the 2025 Forbes Midas Seed List.

He has been a visiting lecturer at Cornell Tech since January 2024, teaching "Thinking Like a VC"^[2].

As a writer, Rosenbloom has published in Harvard Business Review^[5], nine articles in TechCrunch between 2014 and 2019^[6], and guest posts in CB Insights^[9].

Rosenbloom has appeared on podcasts and in publications focused on venture capital, startup strategy, and capital efficiency.

His written work includes nine TechCrunch columns (2014–2019) covering topics from capital efficiency to retail physics to fintech funding^[6], a Harvard Business Review article on VC dry powder^[5], and a CB Insights guest post on the risks of strategic investors^[9].

Quotations attributed to Rosenbloom in published sources.

Rosenbloom lives in New York. He is the father of two sons, and his Founder Collective biography describes him as "a proud papa of two boys that he can still beat in tennis (barely)"^[1].

He is a self-described 4.0 USTA-rated tennis player and wellness gadget enthusiast.