How a Lawyer-Founded VC Startup Wants to Take on AngelList and Carta

• Sydecar, a deal-execution platform for VC investors, just raised $8.3 million in seed funding.
• The startup was founded by two Big Law attorneys who also started their own venture funds.
• The company is trying to compete with market leaders through standardization and legal expertise.

Sydecar, a new deal-execution platform for venture-capital investors just announced an $8.3 million seed round to help it take on the competition.

Sydecar, which handles back-office tasks for emerging venture investors, was founded in 2021 by two former tech attorneys who left their Big Law jobs to colaunch a VC firm.

“When we were starting our fund, it was very, very hard for us to get off the ground. It was slow and painful working with other service providers,” said Nik Talreja, a cofounder and the CEO of Sydecar. “So we decided to take a stab at reinventing how venture operates for emerging managers.”

Sydecar helps investors save both time and money by automating the banking, compliance, contracts, and reporting processes, Talreja said.

The startup is entering an already crowded market of platforms that help VC investors raise funds and invest capital. Talreja said his background as a lawyer and Sydecar’s “product-driven method” would enable the startup to take on market leaders, such as AngelList and Carta.

The seed round was led by Deciens Capital, with participation from Pipeline Capital Partners, Anthemis Group, and Hustle Fund VC. The roster of angel investors includes Mike Vaughan, the former chief operating officer of Venmo; Rohini Pandhi, the product lead at Square; Daniel Khan, the open finance lead at Plaid; and Nik Milanović, a general partner at The Fintech Fund.

Using a lawyerly lens to spot market opportunities

Talreja said he and his cofounder, David Meister, have firsthand knowledge of what emerging fund managers need. They both represented startups and venture funds at elite firms, including Cooley, Weil Gotshal, and Sullivan & Cromwell.

The market for VC platforms is still “fairly nascent,” and existing solutions don’t “anticipate or react to what customers really want today, which is efficiency, a frictionless transaction, more focus on relationships and information sharing, and ultimately

liquidity

,” Talreja said.

“There’s not a whole lot of homogeneity because every deal is still so specifically negotiated, but that actually may not make sense,” he continued.

Sydecar wants to create a standardized process for emerging investors raising funds and investing capital, from opening bank accounts to generating agreements for signing. Legal forms ultimately drive every transaction and venture, and Talreja and Meister say they can use their legal expertise to make tools to automate those forms and processes.

This strategy differs from traditional VC platforms, which typically rely on large operations teams to handle banking, compliance, tax, and regulatory filings, Talreja said. Sydecar instead enables investors to control more of the process and complete tasks at a faster rate, he added.

Target customer base and visions for growth

Sydecar’s core customers are new fund managers and angel investors who are interested in tapping into the VC world. “They don’t want complexity. They don’t want to negotiate with LPs,” Talreja said.

The alternative investment industry, which includes venture capital, is projected to hit $14 trillion by 2023, the data tracker Preqin indicated.

So far, Sydecar has helped thousands of investors close over $350 million in deals, the company said.

It plans to use the fresh seed capital to hire 30 to 40 additional employees in its product, engineering, customer-experience, marketing, and operations teams. Talreja said it also aims to expand its partnerships with enterprise companies to enable API integrations and launch more deals.