Bee Partners, a pre-seed venture capital firm with offices in Silicon Valley and Denver, today announced the promotion of Austin Grisham to Principal, Portfolio & Firm Operations.  This move underlines Bee Partners as an established manager with Austin’s recent contributions in portfolio and firm support.

Austin joined Bee Partners in 2022 after spending three years in private equity and founding two companies.  His promotion to Principal, Portfolio & Firm Operations is evidence of his work supporting Bee’s platform model for inception-stage companies and helping them build from 0-1. 

“Austin has brought an energy and process since day one,” said Michael Berolzheimer, Founder and Managing Partner at Bee Partners. “He is highly strategic and deftly balances the priorities and efficiencies expected from both our portfolio companies and LPs.  He continues to deliver for our pre-seed portfolio as they move forward to Series A and beyond.”

Working closely with Tim Smith, Partner, Portfolio Operations, Austin helps lead portfolio support in marketing, GTM, storytelling and service provider partnerships.  He also works with Michael Berolzheimer on managing firm operations and investor relations, which has included automating 50% of Bee’s marketing function. 

“I could not be more grateful for the opportunity to grow with Bee Partners,” Austin said. “I love moving fast and getting things done - it’s so fun to offer up my skills as a previous founder to our portfolio and support our firm with anything we need to level up, specifically with growing our ecosystem of investors, deal flow partners and the best founders out there.  I’ve loved being a part of what we have established for our portfolio and firm and I cannot wait to see where we go in the coming years”. 

From Founder to Venture Capital: An Unconventional Approach

Before joining Bee Partners, Austin worked in healthcare, marketing, operations and international development.  He spent years supporting emerging markets in East Africa and Central America mostly in agribusiness and with small scale service startups.  He then founded a marketing agency and web dev shop. While operating the agency’s growth, Austin co-founded an organic ingredients supply chain in East Africa.  He later became an owner/operator of an established Whole Foods CPG company in the Rocky Mountain region, later selling the company to a 100-year-old retail shop in Steamboat, Colorado.  Austin navigated his way to a buyout private equity fund based in Denver before meeting Partner, Kira Noodleman and the remaining Bee team.  The rest is history.

Looking Ahead

As Principal, Portfolio & Firm Operations, Austin will continue to offer endless support to Bee’s earliest and growing companies.  He will continue to drive Bee’s firm operations and ecosystem expansion to ensure Bee’s brand as the best pre-seed investor in venture capital. 

Outside of his professional work, Austin has been a photographer for over 25 years focusing his most recent work on the ski and mountain bike industries.  He spends his free time with friends and family and has a passion for high altitude adventures.

About Bee Partners

We are at the outset of a decades-long supercycle of AI-enabled machines that will drive evermore affordable and accessible software, hardware and biology.  This supercycle is persistent and rapidly evolving, and favors adaptive, technical and bold founders.  This is what we’re looking for. 

Bee Partners invests at the pre-seed, providing deep tech exposure for our LPs.  We invest pre-product and pre-revenue in 8-10 companies per year, offering Founders both $500k-$1.5M in funding as well as deep partnership with our network in exchange for meaningful ownership. In doing so, we underwrite every position to return the fund.  Bee’s partnership model is built on integrity and trust with our Founders, delivering value from day one in the form of strategic introductions to customers, future partners and employees and capital sources.

Bee Partners model has led its pre-seed portfolio to a 60% matriculation rate to Series A with more than $2B in follow-on capital from the world’s top VCs.