Who We Are

Based out of Southern Indiana, Louisville, Kentucky, and Dallas, Texas. Render Capital invests in early-stage companies across the Midwest and South(avoiding NY/SF/Boston), spanning multiple industries to build a robust and diverse portfolio.

Render Capital is dedicated to investing in companies transforming legacy industries and archaic models by making emerging technologies accessible. These industries represent a substantial part of the Midwest and Southern economies, providing significant opportunities for growth and innovation. By supporting businesses that drive this democratization, we aim to generate strong returns while capitalizing on the potential of these vital regions.

Year’s End Wrap: Key Learnings in 2025

As we wrap up the year, our team wants to share what we learned this year. Some lessons were taught through positive experiences, while others were taught through less favorable conditions.

First time pulling a term sheet.
We offered it. The founder went quiet and misaligned. That’s not a paperwork issue, it’s a partnership tell. If cadence and clarity break before the honeymoon, I’d rather protect our founders, LPs, and future co-investors than add a bad egg.

Don’t appease your way into bad structure.
Founders own product; investors own venture terms. Our job is to design a capital stack and governance that compound. When we try to “be nice” by contorting terms, we’re just exporting today’s friction into tomorrow’s boardroom. Venture is our game; play it fair, firm, and transparent. Founder-friendly is overrated; great founders want to be challenged and tested because they know those are the requirements in the journey to building and being something great.

Watch the word “strategic.”
The right strategics accelerates. The wrong ones add meetings, vetoes, and press-release timelines. That can set founders back, and for VCs with LPs, it muddies fiduciary focus. Choose partners who ship value on aligned timelines.

Operating principles we’re doubling down on

Speed × judgment.
Speed without judgment = entanglement. Judgment without speed = missed opportunities. The goal is to find equilibrium; the difficult part is that equilibrium is different for every company/opportunity.

Fewer, better questions.
There will always be more reasons to say no, especially in early-stage startups. Death by a thousand questions is real. Only a few truly matter:
• Are we delivering the best possible value to customers every day?
• Do we deliver what they want, the way they want it, when they want it, and where they want it?

What We’re Reading

1. GTIG AI Threat Tracker: Advances in Threat Actor Usage of AI Tools - Google’s cybersecurity team found that hackers and bad actors are starting to use AI, including tools like Google’s Gemini, in more advanced ways. In the past, hackers used AI just to make their jobs easier (like writing code faster).

2. The Transformative Impact of AI on Insurance Underwriting: A Technical Analysis - Recent research shows AI-driven underwriting improves risk-assessment accuracy by 43%, cuts manual processing by 67%, and reduces loss ratios by nearly 19%.

3. The Universe Is Not Locally Real. Here’s How Physicists Proved It - Physicists proved the universe is not “locally real,” meaning particles don’t have definite properties until measured and can influence each other across vast distances.

4. Why ‘hold forever’ investors are snapping up venture capital ‘zombies’ - VC’s power law can produce Alpha when companies stall and are purchased for pennies on the bloated valuations VC gives them, then flipping.

5. Favorite podcast channel of 2025: Sourcery