Mike Maples
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Fund: Opening the Gates to Success
FLOODGATE helps today’s most ambitious entrepreneurs develop tomorrow’s great business success stories. We’ve developed a new approach to investing in world-changing ideas. Looking at the world through the eyes of the entrepreneur, we’ve filled a widening gap between Angel investors and venture capital firms. But we help companies with more than just fundraising: we help them discover, refine, evolve, and master the core elements of their businesses so they will be in the best possible position to one day “open the floodgates” to market disruption and dominance. Some of the world’s most exciting new companies have embraced our approach. If you have a game-changing idea and a passion for building a truly legendary company, contact us .
FLOODGATE offers a unique Super Angel fundraising model that bridges the gap between initial seed money raised from traditional “Angel” investors and the much larger investments that characterize traditional Venture Capitalists. This Super Angel fundraising approach is designed to align with the emerging realities of start-up financing: Lower start-up costs: Low-cost hardware, open-source software, offshore talent, and search engine marketing have collapsed the up-front cost of starting a company and achieving customer validation. Larger fund sizes: $100 million was once a “mega-fund” in venture capital. That’s no longer the case, as fund sizes routinely pass $500 million and a few even top $1 billion.
Fund: Opening the Gates to Success
When Mike Maples came out to Silicon Valley in 2005 - before YouTube, Twitter and Facebook were household names - he set out to fill a void in the investing spectrum - the one between angels and venture firms. Five years later, his firm, Floodgate , is a leading "super angel" or "micro-cap VC" firm helping to fund companies seeking $200,000 to $500,000 on the low end to $1 million at the high end. His firm is also one of the early investors in Twitter with some $25,000 that was re-invested into Twitter in 2007, after Twitter co-founder Evan Williams' company Odeo folded.