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Caffeinated Capital

Caffeinated Capital (known as Caffeinated) is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco and New York, founded by Raymond Tonsing in 2008. It mainly leads seed and Series A rounds and continues to invest throughout a company’s life; it originally operated as a single-partner fund, has invested in companies including Affirm, Airtable, Saronic and Virta Health, and led Varda Space IndustriesVarda Space IndustriesVarda Space Industries is a space and microgravity life sciences company headquartered in El Segundo, California. It builds its own W-Series satellites and reentry capsules, processes pharmaceuticals and other materials in the microgravity of low Earth orbit and returns them to the ground in its capsules, and also provides a hypersonic reentry flight test platform for the U.S. military and NASA. The company was founded by Will Bruey and Delian Asparouhov; as of October 2026 it had raised $598 million in total.Open the full entry’ Series B.

Contents8 sections
Key facts

Raymond Tonsing Founds Caffeinated

Matthew Volosin began working with Caffeinated in 2009 and joined full-time as partner and chief operating officer in 2013, helping scale the single-partner fund model; he now leads the operational side of the firm’s evolution into a multi-partner platform and oversees non-investment functions including operations, fund administration, legal, finance, compliance, deal execution and LP relations.⁠[1][1][1]

Registers as an Exempt Reporting Adviser

Its management entity, Caffeinated Capital Management, LLC, formerly known as Orange Wall Capital, LLC, has been an exempt reporting adviser in California since November 8, 2012, and with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission since February 3, 2014 (file number 802-79188); it also registered in Colorado, New York and Ohio from November 7, 2023. Its regulatory office address is in Aspen, Colorado.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

Varun Gupta Joins

Varun Gupta joined Caffeinated in 2020. He previously worked as a data scientist and machine learning engineer at Affirm before its IPO, and earlier at Expanse and Wealthfront; as a generalist investor he sourced companies such as Saronic and Neion, and he is now a partner based in New York.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

Investing in Varda Space Industries

Raymond Tonsing personally invested in Varda Space Industries’ seed round in December 2020. In July 2021, Caffeinated Capital co-led Varda’s $42 million Series A with Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, with Varda describing Caffeinated as a primary backer of Boom Aerospace; in April 2024, Caffeinated led Varda’s $90 million Series B, and Tonsing said Varda was one of the few ambitious startups that actually carries out its plans. It later participated in Varda’s $187 million Series C in July 2025 and $251 million Series D in September 2026.⁠[3][4][5][6][7][8]

Investment Approach and Philosophy

Caffeinated describes itself as based in San Francisco and New York, mainly leading seed and Series A rounds and investing throughout the life of technology companies. It argues that the industrialization of venture capital has driven out long-term thinking and offers founders “the luxury of long-term thinking”: a small team with no internal politics or promotion ladders that works together on every investment and commits to taking genuine early-stage risk.⁠[9][10][10][10][10][10]

The representative investments Caffeinated cites include leading Airtable’s Series B when no one else wanted to, leading Saronic’s Series A before defense tech became popular, co-leading and then leading Varda’s Series A and Series B before its first launch, and becoming the first and later largest investor in Virta Health and Aven.⁠[10][10]

Portfolio

As of October 2026, the companies Caffeinated lists include Airtable (co-led seed, led Series B, and participated in Series A and Series C through F), Varda Space Industries (seed, co-led Series A, led Series B, Series C), Onebrief (led seed and Series A, participated in Series B and C), Saronic (led Series A, participated in Series B and C), CloudTrucks (led Series A, participated in Series B), Virta Health (seed, Series A and Series B through E), Aven (co-led seed, led Series C), Affirm (seed, Series D and E; IPO in 2021), Federato (led seed and Series B) and Human Intelligence (led seed and Series A), as well as Antares Industries, Kindred and Advanced Manufacturing Company of America.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9]

Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts

Caffeinated Capital: Official website: https://www.caffeinated.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

Sources

  1. Caffeinated | Team (opens in a new window)
  2. CAFFEINATED CAPITAL MANAGEMENT, LLC (opens in a new window)
  3. Our start (opens in a new window)
  4. Varda Raises $42MM Series A, to build humanity’s first Space Factories (opens in a new window)
  5. SLS Client Caffeinated Capital Leads Varda Space Industries’ $90MM Series B Round (opens in a new window)
  6. Varda Space Industries Raises $90 Million in Series B Funding (opens in a new window)
  7. SLS Client Caffeinated Capital Joins Varda’s $187MM Series C Round (opens in a new window)
  8. Varda Announces $251 Million Series D to Scale Space-Based Pharmaceutical Processing (opens in a new window)
  9. Caffeinated (opens in a new window)
  10. Caffeinated | Philosophy (opens in a new window)