Sophia Amoruso, the serial entrepreneur of Girlboss and Nasty Gal fame, now has nearly a year under her belt as a venture capitalist.
Amoruso’s Trust Fund has, to date, pumped more than $1 million into seven companies, many of which underscore her expertise in running fashion and digital businesses.
The $5 million fund’s investors count big names in Silicon Valley and Hollywood: Marc Andreessen; Chris Dixon, Andrew Chen and Jeff Jordan of Andreessen Horowitz; Jeremy Liew of Light Speed; Paris Hilton; and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams among several others.
“It’s a tough job, but one I love,” Amoruso wrote to subscribers of her newsletter last week in offering an update on the fund. “One callout here: it is a job. While it may seem like I have total freedom to sling money around into whatever startups I want, it’s not that simple.”
Amoruso ventured into the ed tech realm after selling Girlboss to media and technology holding company Attention Capital in 2019 on undisclosed terms.
She’s leveraged the community built since the time of Nasty Gal and Girlboss, parlaying those ventures into an entrepreneurship program and community called Business Class. She’s scaled quickly with unique branding that’s been a trait across her startups. In Business Class’s case, it’s a retro flight-inspired theme.
Trust Fund launched in January, raising $5 million. Amoruso continues to have a direct megaphone to her follower base via her newsletters where she distills many of the complexities behind entrepreneurship and fundraising through the personal experiences.
Trust Fund Q3
That was the case last week when Amoruso gave her followers a glimpse of what she presented in her third-quarter report to Trust Fund investors.
Among the roster of companies Trust Fund’s invested in are mostly tech businesses, such as Browse AI. The company’s robots have been used by the likes of Amazon and Walmart to extract specific information on a website and aggregate it into, for example, a spreadsheet. Browse AI has received $200,000 from the fund. There’s also Nectar AI, which is still operating in stealth mode. Nectar AI created an AI-based tool that makes it easier for brands to engage and potentially convert consumers via their direct messages.
Not far from Amoruso’s initial entrepreneurial success in fashion and retail, is a company called BinStar that aims to address what businesses can do with returned and unsold merchandise via a rummage sale-inspired store model. Meanwhile, Packsmith aims to localize final mile logistics by paying individuals to handle fulfillment from their homes for small- to medium-sized businesses, addressing a key challenge related to fulfillment as e-commerce sales grow.
Trust Fund works with pre-seed or seed stage companies. Investments are in the range of $100,000 to $200,000.
“I love helping founders, and I’m ever so grateful to have found my (yet another) calling,” Amoruso said in her newsletter.
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