Welcoming Riley Finch to 1Sharpe Ventures

1Sharpe Ventures is excited to welcome Riley Finch as an Associate on the investor team.

Riley will be focused on sourcing, diligence, and portfolio support for 1SV’s investments in early-stage businesses (Pre-Seed → Series A). Additionally, Riley is supporting thesis development and incubation strategies, with an immediate bend towards the role that artificial intelligence and language model innovations will play in reshaping built world and financial industries (shoot us a note if you’re building or exploring this space!).

Riley brings prior operating and investing expertise to the team – with a particular focus on building and scaling financial technology. As an operator-founded fund, we love welcoming a team member who has no problem rolling his sleeves up and getting into the weeds with founders.

Additionally, Riley brings a sharp capital markets perspective, which aligns with one of 1SV’s core value props: helping founders unlock the most optimal structure across both equity and debt — with the capital markets horsepower to back it up (1Sharpe manages >$2bn in credit and housing investments).

In his own words, he describes this fit:

“Joining a multi strategy fund is an opportunity near and dear to me, and I think it’s important to elaborate on what got me to this point.

After university — I joined the GTM team at a Series A FinTech company called Clearbanc (now Clearco)

I quickly learned about how important non-dilutive capital, along with equity, is to the success of a business, how important ownership is, and how that success can transform the lives of not only the founder, but stakeholders across the entire value chain of the business.

After my first few months at Clearco, I joined the partnerships team to scale the VC channel under the sage leadership of Shen Sivananthan and Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer.

Working with hundreds of consumer founders on their fundraising strategy — I immediately caught the venture bug, and sights were set on moving into an investing role.

After Clearco — I was fortunate to spend the last 2 years at Afore Capital on the Operations and Platform side working with founders and investors alike. A recurring theme for many companies was using debt to retain ownership, and scale repeatable costs without diluting the founders.

Which is why joining a firm like 1Sharpe Ventures is so exciting. The ability to give founders access to a world class platform offering equity, debt, capital markets support, real estate partnerships and the savvy to help founders maximize potential while retaining ownership is few and far between.”

In addition to the tangible fit in background and experience, one thing that resonated with us as we got to know Riley was how many people felt he was “on their team” — as a brainstorm partner, a connector, a hustler, and a friend. It maybe harkens back to his athlete background, as a National sailing champion in Canada and alumni of the National Ski Academy. He’s a team player who aligns with our mission to be a hard-working, creative and thoughtful partner to our founders, LPs and broader community.

We are thrilled to have Riley on the team!

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1Sharpe Ventures Leads, Co-Leads, and participates in rounds from Pre-Seed through Series A, with average check sizes between $500k and $2m.

If you’re a founder building across FinTech, PropTech, The Built Environment, or think there might be a fit otherwise, don’t hesitate to reach out.