Notation Capital, a new, “pre-seed” stage firm founded by former Betaworks colleagues Nicholas Chirls and Alex Lines, closes debut fund with $8M
New York Pre-Seed Fund Notation Capital Raises $8 Million Fund … A duo that helped develop numerous New York startups …
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2015, former Betaworks colleagues Nicholas Chirls and Alex Lines formalize what they had been doing informally — backing very young New York startups — by closing an $8M debut fund under their own shingle, Notation Capital. The timing matters because it lands just before a decade in which fund sizes run the other way: within months, Lonsdale spins Formation 8's plans into a $400M "8 Partners" vehicle, and by mid-decade-plus the mega-fund wave is unmistakable.
The corpus shows where that wave ends up — Founders Fund pushing assets to $11B across early and late-stage funds and Benchmark eventually adding a $1.25B growth fund after decades of staying small — which frames Notation's $8M not as small news but as the other pole of the market taking shape.
First-order effects
- New York pre-seed founders gain a dedicated local institutional check sized for $8M of deployment, rather than relying on accelerators or angels alone.
- Chirls and Lines shift from Betaworks operator roles to full-time fund managers, betting their sourcing edge comes from having built startups themselves.
Second-order effects
- As large firms chase bigger checks upmarket, the earliest stage becomes underserved by them — creating room for more micro-funds like Notation to specialize precisely where billion-dollar vehicles cannot price an entry position.
- Early founders also gain non-dilutive substitutes for that first check: Capchase's later rise shows financing tools competing directly with pre-seed equity at the margins.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, venture structurally bifurcates into a barbell — tiny specialist pre-seed vehicles feeding companies toward multibillion-dollar growth funds — rather than one-size generalist funds spanning all stages.
- Small funds' viability increasingly depends on financial plumbing around them, from LP liquidity tools like Turbine letting backers borrow against fund positions to secondary markets absorbing early stakes.
The trend: Venture capital is polarizing into sub-$10M specialist funds at the entry stage and multibillion-dollar vehicles at the growth stage, with each end optimizing for a different part of the company lifecycle.