Investors / United States / Motive Force
Motive Force
Venture capital · San Francisco, CA, United States · North America
Motive Force is an investment firm that backs founders, focusing on the founders' intent, taste and emotional durability rather than traction signals. It emphasizes craftsmanship and design in software, arguing that well-built products generate better returns.
Invests inAI & Machine LearningCybersecurityEnterprise Software
In its own wordssoftwaredesigncraftsmanshipfounders
Your fit with Motive Force
Four questions about your startup
See how your round matches what it backs, point by point.
Or find every investor that fitsMotive Force lists 15 checked portfolio companies on its own site and is named in 2 funding rounds. Its most frequent entry is Pre-seed, 50% of the companies with a known first round. Its largest themes are AI & Machine Learning (38%), Cybersecurity (21%) and Enterprise Software (17%). 78% of its companies are based in United States. It invests most often alongside Afore Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Capital One Ventures.
Counts come from funding rounds that name Motive Force, complete from mid-2025: earlier rounds appear only when they were reported later. Round amounts and full round histories are on Fundup AI.
Round figures show recent activity, not Motive Force's whole history. Rounds on record name 2 companies; its own site lists 15. Funding rounds are complete from mid-2025, so counts and the yearly trend undercount a firm that invested before then. The portfolio, themes and places come from its own site and are not affected.
Entry stage
share of companies by the stage of its first roundMotive Force does not state its stages on its site, so only what it does is shown.
Show as a table
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Pre-seed | 50% |
| Seed | 50% |
| Series A | 0% |
| Series B | 0% |
| Growth | 0% |
Activity by year
rounds it joined, last 10 yearsShow as a table
| Total | Rounds it led | |
|---|---|---|
| '17 | 0 | 0 |
| '18 | 0 | 0 |
| '19 | 0 | 0 |
| '20 | 0 | 0 |
| '21 | 0 | 0 |
| '22 | 0 | 0 |
| '23 | 0 | 0 |
| '24 | 0 | 0 |
| '25 | 0 | 0 |
| '26 | 2 | 0 |
Investor profile
percentile among all firmsShow as a table
| Measure | Percentile of all firms | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Portfolio size | 39th | 15 companies |
| Recent activity | 69th | 2 rounds in 12 months |
| Early stage | 100th | 100% of entries at pre-seed or seed |
| Evidence | 69th | 7% of companies confirmed by a round |
| Sector focus | 70th | 38% in its largest sector |
| Reach | 58th | 3 countries |
Investment themes
share of its checked companiesThis firmAll checked companies
Show as a table
| This firm | All checked companies | |
|---|---|---|
| AI & Machine Learning | 38% | 18% |
| Cybersecurity | 21% | 4% |
| Enterprise Software | 17% | 8% |
| Developer Tools | 7% | 0% |
| Space & Defense | 3% | 3% |
| Robotics & Hardware | 3% | 1% |
| Industrial & Manufacturing | 3% | 7% |
| Healthcare & Biotech | 3% | 15% |
Invests most often with
firms sharing its portfolio companiesShow as a table
| Share | |
|---|---|
| Afore Capital | 2 |
| Bain Capital Ventures | 2 |
| Capital One Ventures | 2 |
| Preston-Werner Ventures | 2 |
| Scale Venture Partners | 2 |
| SoftBank Vision Fund | 2 |
| 01A | 1 |
| 14Peaks Capital | 1 |
Its portfolio companies
where they are based, and what their own sites showSite status
- Site answers15100%
- No longer answers00%
- Points to another company00%
- Parked or sold domain00%
A site that stops answering three checks in a row is counted as no longer answering; that is not proof of closure. A site that points to another company is often an acquisition.
Co-investor network
who it backs companies with, and who they back togetherCompare Motive Force head to head
portfolio size, rounds, entry stages, themes and the companies both backThree or more firms at once: portfolio overlap.
Recent portfolio activity
when companies last raised with Motive Force| Date | Company | Stage |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Oct 2026 | Pre-Seed | |
| 9 Jun 2026 | Seed |
Round details for Motive Force
Amounts, full round histories and every co-investor in Motive Force's rounds are on Fundup AI. VCinfo covers investors and their portfolios.
Portfolio
15 companies checked against their own sites| Company | What it does | Themes | First round with it | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bacca operates production software by monitoring, triaging, and fixing issues, and escalating only when a human is needed. | AI & Machine LearningCybersecurity | Portfolio page | ||
| Charm makes software, including various tools and platforms for building and interacting with terminal applications and artificial intelligence systems. | AI & Machine LearningEnterprise Software | Portfolio page | ||
| Delphina builds an AI data scientist to drive better and faster decisions for companies | AI & Machine LearningEnterprise Software | Portfolio page | ||
| MaintainX provides maintenance and asset management software | Industrial & ManufacturingEnterprise Software | Portfolio page | ||
| Healthleap develops an AI screening program to identify at-risk inpatients, including those with malnutrition, delirium, and aspiration pneumonia, in hospitals. | Healthcare & Biotech | Portfolio page | ||
| Honeycomb provides a platform for observability and debugging of complex software and AI systems | AI & Machine LearningCybersecurity | Portfolio page | ||
| Inngest provides durable execution for workflows and AI | AI & Machine LearningEnterprise Software | Portfolio page | ||
| Observe.AI develops and provides AI agents for customer support and operations | AI & Machine LearningCybersecurity | Portfolio page | ||
| The company provides cloud-based coding agents that can be integrated with platforms like Slack and GitHub. | AI & Machine LearningSpace & Defense | Portfolio page | ||
| The company provides a service to help engineers see the impact of their changes on a live environment before they merge, to prevent outages. | CybersecurityDeveloper Tools | Portfolio page | ||
| Plural provides AI for infrastructure, helping companies manage and automate their infrastructure operations. | AI & Machine LearningCybersecurity | Portfolio page | ||
| The company builds open-weight foundation models and the systems that refine and improve them. | AI & Machine LearningRobotics & Hardware | Portfolio page | ||
| Soffi provides a collaborative staging environment for product development on a real application | Enterprise SoftwareDeveloper Tools | Jun 2026Seed | Page + round | |
| The company provides autonomous accounting and finance services with AI | FintechAI & Machine Learning | Oct 2026Pre-Seed | Funding round | |
| Zuplo provides a unified gateway for APIs, AI, and MCP, allowing for secure, governed, and observed API, LLM, and MCP calls. | AI & Machine LearningCybersecurity | Portfolio page |
About this data
site last read 5 Nov 2026- Site
- motiveforce.ai
- Last read
- 5 Nov 2026
- Watching since
- 5 Nov 2026
- Rounds since
- 9 Jun 2026
- Companies checked
- 15
Rates come from what VCinfo has observed since observation_start. Firms tend to remove companies that closed, so early rates understate reality. A company leaving a portfolio page does not mean it closed or exited. An unreachable site means our checks failed, nothing more.
Get Motive Force's profile as data
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