Haymaker Ventures
ActiveVenture Capital
Updated: ·
Financial History
Total Raised
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Valuation
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Leadership Team
Key people at Haymaker Ventures.
Key people at Haymaker Ventures.
Key people at Haymaker Ventures.
Haymaker Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on fintech, spun out of Thiel Capital in 2017. Its mission is to back founders building superior, differentiated solutions to fundamental, unsolved problems in financial services—rather than simply digitizing or marginally improving existing products. The firm invests at the Seed and Series A stages, making high-conviction bets on companies that can scale rapidly and endure across market cycles.
Haymaker’s philosophy centers on backing exceptional entrepreneurs who think in decades, not quarters, and who are building category-defining businesses in areas like banking, insurance, real estate, and financial infrastructure. By concentrating on fintech and later expanding into adjacent sectors like business software and AI-driven marketplaces through its growth arm, Haymaker has become a notable signal investor in the fintech ecosystem, helping founders navigate regulatory complexity, bank partnerships, and scaling challenges.
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Haymaker Ventures was founded in 2017 as a spinout from Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel’s family office, inheriting a contrarian, founder-centric investment mindset. The firm emerged from a conviction that while fintech had seen an explosion of “more of the same” solutions, there was still massive opportunity for truly novel, foundational financial products.
The firm is led by Phin Upham and a small, tight-knit team including Arieh Levi and Olivia Baribeau, with deep roots in fintech and venture. Early on, Haymaker positioned itself as a specialist in early-stage fintech, writing checks in the $1M–$10M range and taking board or observer seats. Over time, it expanded its mandate through Haymaker Growth, a later-stage strategy developed in partnership with a major Canadian pension fund, allowing it to support portfolio companies through multiple rounds and into scale.
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Haymaker operates at the intersection of two powerful trends: the ongoing unbundling and rebuilding of financial services, and the rise of founder-led, category-creating startups. While much of fintech has focused on “faster, cheaper” versions of legacy products, Haymaker backs founders who are rethinking the fundamentals—new rails, new ownership models, and new financial primitives.
The firm is well-positioned as fintech matures: early consumer fintech has proven product-market fit, and the next wave is infrastructure, B2B fintech, embedded finance, and AI-driven financial decisioning. Haymaker’s focus on durable, defensible businesses with strong unit economics aligns with the current market’s preference for capital efficiency and long-term moats.
By backing “world changers” in overlooked or complex sectors—like real estate finance, insurance tech, and banking infrastructure—Haymaker helps shape the next generation of financial systems, not just the apps that sit on top of them.
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Haymaker is likely to remain a signal investor in early-stage fintech, especially in the U.S., Latin America, and Israel, where it targets companies. As fintech consolidates and investors demand clearer paths to profitability, Haymaker’s emphasis on durable, founder-led businesses with strong moats will become even more valuable.
Going forward, the firm may deepen its presence in AI-native financial products, vertical SaaS with embedded finance, and regulated marketplaces. Its dual-stage structure also positions it to capture more value from winners by staying alongside founders from Seed to scale.
In a world where “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Haymaker backs the founders who keep fighting—and keep building. That’s a powerful filter, and one that will continue to shape the future of finance.
