From left: Ascend partner and chief of staff Jen Haller, founding general partner Kirby Winfield, and principal Nate Bek. (Ascend Photo)
Venture firm Ascend has closed a $17 million third fund and landed its first institutional investor, in what founder Kirby Winfield calls the toughest fundraising market for small venture firms in 15 years.
The Seattle-based firm invests at the earliest stage, often writing the first check into a startup. It was the first investor in Overland AI , the maker of autonomous military vehicles, and an early backer of subsea geothermal startup Endurance Energy , among others.
Ascend Fund III will back more physical AI startups building robots, energy systems, defense technology and other ventures that blend software and hardware — part of a larger bet on what the Ascend team likes to call Seattle’s “Third Act.”
Winfield said raising a third fund in this market shows that Ascend has “arrived on the national stage,” along with Seattle’s rise as a hub for this new class of startups. He said the firm’s track record puts it in the same league as the country’s top seed investors.
“We are not just some nice guys in the corner of the country helping out our neighbors,” said Winfield, who works closely with Jen Haller , Ascend partner and chief of staff, and Nate Bek , a principal at the firm.
Who’s backing the fund: The new institutional investor is FirstLook Partners, a firm that invests in smaller venture funds. Josh Porter , FirstLook’s co-founder and managing partner, said the firm, which is “very bullish on the Seattle ecosystem,” looked at several startup markets outside San Francisco and New York and met many investors in Seattle, “but all roads kept leading back to Kirby.”
Porter said Winfield has “lived the founder journey” and has “the operational chops to sit across the table from a founder and empathize with what they’re going through.”
The rest of the fund comes from family offices, founders who have sold companies, and more than a dozen founders of Ascend portfolio companies.
A tough market for small funds: Ascend’s raise comes as smaller venture firms struggle to bring in new money. Their investors, mostly wealthy individuals and family offices, are waiting longer for returns from earlier funds.
Just 211 newer venture firms closed at least one fund through the end of September, down from 927 in all of 2022, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor . Established firms took a record 88.2% of the money raised by U.S. venture funds in the first nine months of the year, the report found. Porter said smaller firms have to show “a right to exist and a right to win deals.”
Ascend launched its first fund in 2019 and ultimately raised $15 million. Its second fund closed at $25 million in 2023. The firm generally operates in the $15 million to $25 million range and writes the same size checks regardless of fund size, Winfield said.
“We think Kirby knows his place in the larger ecosystem, knows the value he brings to the table, and has sized his fund accordingly,” Porter said.
The firm has already drawn about 60% of the money committed to Fund III. GeekWire first reported that the firm was raising the fund in April 2025, based on filings at the time. Endurance was one of the firm’s first investments from the new fund, in mid-2025 .
Ascend’s track record: Winfield started Ascend after two decades in leadership roles at four startups. He described the first fund as a proof of concept that “stumbled into some unicorns,” including Fabric, an e-commerce software company that was valued at $1.5 billion in 2022. Ascend was in its first round.
With its second fund, Ascend moved away from consumer and marketplace investing to focus on enterprise AI and deep tech. Its most successful investments from that fund, according to Winfield, include Overland AI, Sabi, Yoodli and Zocks.
After Ascend’s first checks, its portfolio companies have gone on to raise more than $1.5 billion from investors including Accel, Benchmark, Bessemer, Founders Fund, Khosla and Lightspeed, according to Ascend.
Ascend’s second and third funds rank in the top 10% of funds of $50 million or less, based on current valuations of their portfolio companies, Winfield said, citing figures Ascend shared with its investors at its annual meeting. The firm didn’t disclose specific returns or how much cash it has returned to its investors.
What Ascend looks for: The firm looks for ideas that seem too difficult, too boring, too confusing or too small for big multistage venture firms to evaluate. Ideally, Winfield said, its founders are doing something that makes Series A investors “a little bit nervous.”
That’s why Ascend hasn’t made many more defense tech investments since backing Overland, he said. Valuations for well-known founders in the sector have soared as more investors have piled in.
“The time to invest in defense tech was when nobody was investing in defense tech,” Winfield said.
Porter said Ascend’s focus on Seattle and physical AI is “really the bet we made with Ascend,” adding that Endurance and Overland have the potential to become “generational, category-defining companies.”
Fund III also backs AI software and infrastructure companies, including Seattle-area startup Govstream.ai, which uses AI to speed city permitting.
Seattle’s economic climate: Winfield is a champion of Seattle’s startup scene, known for Ascend’s annual Founders Bash party in the city and his ever-present ☔🔥☔ emojis on social media , symbolizing hot startups in rainy Seattle.
Ascend’s refreshed website and brand, launched with Fund III, nod to the firm’s Seattle roots with its longstanding Seattle Startup Toolkit and a Spotify playlist of Pacific Northwest indie rock and hip-hop.
But Winfield has also been a vocal critic of state and local policies he sees as hostile to startups, including Washington’s new tax on income over $1 million, which takes effect in 2028 and survived a repeal vote last week. He worries the tax could eventually be extended to people earning $150,000 a year, which would make it harder for startups to recruit employees from places like Texas.
“The chilling effect that’s going to have on the ecosystem is real, and it’s happening,” he said.
About 60% of Ascend’s portfolio companies are based in Seattle, according to the firm.
Bek said hardware companies such as Endurance and Overland still have good reasons to be in Seattle, including testing on Lake Union and in Yakima, access to the sea and University of Washington talent. For Overland, he said, that also means proximity to Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
Combined with the region’s history in aerospace, defense and energy, Winfield noted, those advantages make Seattle one of the country’s key hubs for building physical products. He called it “El Segundo Northwest,” a reference to the Los Angeles-area city that has become a hub for defense and hardware startups.
As Winfield notes, Ascend isn’t the only early-stage firm chasing these companies. Pre-seed firms such as Cantos, Ironspring and Silent Ventures are backing similar founders, and some Seattle firms that historically focused on software are becoming more open to investing in hardware.
Ultimately, he said, Seattle still benefits from a long legacy of technical founders, and Ascend is “betting that those folks are going to continue to create companies that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
