About Longinus
Founded at Stanford University, Longinus Ventures is a pre-seed fund run by the leaders of ASES, the largest entrepreneurship organization at Stanford.
We write the first check to student founders, often before they've raised a dollar.
Most venture firms compete for founders after they've already decided to build.
They meet talent on the day of the pitch — rehearsed, polished, on their best behavior. At Longinus, we meet founders earlier: as peers, in the dorms, the dining halls, the clubs, before there's anything to pitch.
Our General Partners run ASES, Stanford's premier entrepreneurship organization. Each fall, that gives us hundreds of detailed profiles of the university's most ambitious builders. We track them as they move — launched projects, research publications, hackathon results — using an internal agentic pipeline that keeps that picture current across hundreds of founders at once, something no partner could do by hand. That's what lets years of relationships turn into an actual dataset instead of just anecdotes. The pipeline compounds every cycle: it refreshes with each incoming class, our earliest investments become references and scouts inside the same communities, and we enter each fund with more data, warmer relationships, and stronger proof that the best founders on campus take our capital first.
The name reflects the philosophy. Longinus was the Roman soldier who recognized what others failed to see. The most consequential moment in a company's life is often before revenue, before product-market fit, sometimes before there's a company at all — the moment a founder commits to a vision. That's where we focus.
Longinus Ventures exists to identify exceptional founders at the moment of formation and partner with them from the beginning.
Why now.
9 percent of new U.S. businesses last year were started by Gen Z founders, ahead of Boomers for the first time.
9%of new U.S. businesses last year were started by Gen Z founders, ahead of Boomers for the first time. (Source: Gusto, 2026)
The cost of building has collapsed. A Stanford sophomore with today's tools ships what took a team of twenty a decade ago. We think that quietly breaks the old rule that founders need years of experience first. We might be wrong. We're betting we're not.
Our team
Get in touch.
Founders from the ASES network and co-investors who want access.