First Round Capital

First Round Capital was founded in 2004 by Josh Kopelman and Howard Morgan. Kopelman had previously founded Half.com, which was acquired by eBay in 2000. Morgan helped found Idealab and served as Founding President of Renaissance Technologies.

The firm was established to focus exclusively on seed-stage investing at a time when most venture capital firms concentrated on later-stage deals. By 2009, Bloomberg reported that First Round had become the country’s most active seed-stage investor.

Morgan retired in 2017, while Kopelman remained as Managing Partner of the firm. He has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors multiple times, including a ranking of 4th in 2015, after leading First Round’s investments in Notion, Clover, AppNexus, and Flatiron Health.

In addition to Kopelman, First Round’s partners include Bill Trenchard, who joined in 2012 and has made the Midas List five times after leading investments in Looker, Verkada, and Flexport, Brett Berson, who started at First Round in 2008 as a college intern before being named a partner in 2016, Todd Jackson, who spent his career in product management at some of the biggest companies in tech, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and Liz Wessel, who joined in 2023 and was named to the Forbes Midas Brink List in 2025.

First Round invested in the 2017 $3.9M seed round of Verkada, a cloud-based enterprise security camera company that was recently valued at $5.8 billion in December 2025. The firm was also a pre-seed investor in K2 Space, a satellite manufacturing company founded by former SpaceX engineers that reached a $3 billion valuation in December 2025.