Omni Ventures Closes $33M Fund I Focused on Manufacturing Tech
The oversubscribed debut fund backs pre-seed startups digitizing factory floors with AI, robotics, and automation.
Omni Ventures just closed a $33 million Fund I — and it came in oversubscribed. That's a signal worth paying attention to in a VC market where first-time funds are a tough sell. The San Jose-based firm is laser-focused on one thing: dragging manufacturing into the digital age.
Running the show are general partners Simon Lancaster and Sabrina Paseman, both ex-Apple product and manufacturing engineers who made the jump to founders. These aren't finance people playing industrial tourist — they've actually worked the problem they're now funding.
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Omni writes $700,000 to $1 million checks into pre-seed startups building software, AI, robotics, automation, and connected industrial systems. That's an early, high-conviction bet on founders who are still shaping their products. The check size is small enough to get in early but meaningful enough to move the needle for a scrappy pre-seed team.
The manufacturing tech space is genuinely massive and chronically underinvested from a software standpoint. Factories still run on legacy systems that haven't meaningfully evolved in decades. If even a fraction of that infrastructure migrates to modern digital tools, the upside for early investors is enormous. Omni is positioning itself as the specialist VC that founders in this niche call first.
For retail investors, you can't write a check into Fund I directly — but watching which startups Omni backs gives you a real-time map of where smart, operationally experienced money thinks manufacturing tech is heading. Continue reading at Yahoo.
