Ian Rountree is the Founder & General Partner of Cantos Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with $90M under management dedicated to backing deeply technical founders at inception across climate tech, computational biology, aerospace, and next-generation computing.

Ian started making angel investments in 2012 while on the early teams at SoFi Bank and then Invisible Technologies. He founded Cantos in 2016 to continue backing world-positive startups at pre-seed & seed stage. 

In September 2022 they raised $50M for their third fund to invest in “near frontier” startups, which have the potential to mitigate climate change, disease, armed conflict, poverty, and existential risk on a global scale.

About VSC Ventures:

For 20 years, our award-winning ⁠PR agency VSC⁠ has worked with innovative startups on positioning, messaging, and awareness and we are bringing that same expertise to help climate startups with storytelling and narrative building. Last year, general partners Vijay Chattha and Jay Kapoor raised a $21M fund to co-invest in the most promising startups alongside leading climate funds.

Through the conversations on our show CLIMB by VSC, we're excited to share what we're doing at VSC and VSC Ventures on climate innovation with companies like ⁠Ample⁠, ⁠Actual⁠, ⁠Sesame Solar⁠, ⁠Synop⁠, ⁠Vibrant Planet⁠, and ⁠Zume⁠ among many others.