Base10 Partners

The investment thesis behind Base10 Partners does not begin with identity. It begins with economics. Co-founders Adeyemi Ajao and TJ Nahigian, who launched the San Francisco firm in 2017, built their strategy around a structural observation: that the sectors driving the largest share of economic activity — food, retail, logistics, healthcare, financial services — are also the sectors most ripe for automation-driven disruption, and that the founders building automation tools for these "Real Economy" sectors are systematically overlooked by a venture capital industry organized around consumer apps and enterprise SaaS sold to technology companies. The overlooked founders are building for the 99 percent. Base10 is their investor.

Ajao and Nahigian brought complementary formation to the partnership: Ajao, a Lagos-born founder and operator, previously built companies including Tuenti (acquired by Telefonica) and Identified (acquired by Workday); Nahigian founded Jobr (acquired by Monster), then spent years as an investor at Accel, Summit Partners, and Coatue, where he helped launch the firm's private investing practice. Together, they built a research-driven investment process — drawing on hedge fund methodology, automated outbound sourcing, and a proprietary internal software platform called Base11 — that allows the firm to identify high-quality companies outside traditional Silicon Valley networks more systematically than a relationship-dependent sourcing model permits.

The portfolio validates the approach: Figma, Notion, Nubank, Brex, Plaid, and Instacart are among the most consequential technology companies of the past decade, and Base10 invested in each before the market consensus had formed. Fund III closed at $460 million in 2022, making Base10 the largest Black-led venture capital fund in the world. The firm donates 50 percent of its carry from its largest investments to historically Black colleges and universities to fund scholarships — a commitment that is described not as philanthropy but as an investment in the next generation of founders and capital allocators whose presence in the ecosystem will generate the next generation of returns.