Dorm Room Fund

Dorm Room Fund was not founded to be a venture capital firm. It was founded to answer a question: what happens when student founders are evaluated and backed by investors who are also student founders, who understand from lived experience what it means to build a company while navigating a course load, a dormitory lease, and the skepticism of everyone in one's life who believes the timing is wrong?

Backed by First Round Capital since its founding in 2012, Dorm Room Fund is a student-run venture fund with chapters at universities across the United States — an institution in which student Investment Partners select the investments, conduct the diligence, and manage the portfolio relationships. The model is not pedagogical. The returns are real, the stakes are institutional, and the founders backed by Dorm Room Fund go on to raise from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Benchmark in subsequent rounds. DRF has invested in more than 500 companies across its ten-plus year history, including companies that have grown to significant scale in enterprise software, consumer technology, climate technology, and financial services.

The fund's structure — students investing in students — produces a sourcing advantage that no institutionally staffed fund can replicate. The investment partners at Dorm Room Fund are the same people having dinner with the founders they back, hearing about the product before it has a pitch deck, understanding the founder's capabilities and limitations before they have a track record to present. The diligence is relational in ways that professional VC diligence rarely achieves, and it is applied at the earliest possible stage of company formation — the moment when the capital matters most and is hardest to access from any other source.

Managing Partner Andrew Yu and his colleagues have built DRF's national footprint to include chapters at universities across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Midwest, and West Coast, with an investment team that rotates with each academic cycle, bringing new perspectives and new university networks into the fund continuously. The alumni network — founders who have been backed by DRF and investors who have served as Investment Partners — has become one of the most consequential early-stage networks in the country. For First Round Capital, it is both a pipeline and a proof of concept. For the founders who raise their first check from DRF, it is the beginning.