Mucker Capital

Mucker Capital was founded in 2011 by Erik Rannala and William Hsu, with Los Angeles as its initial test bed. The founding team had spent most of their careers in Silicon Valley as entrepreneurs, senior executives, and investors; they started Mucker to prove that great products and companies can be built without the Valley’s support systems.⁠[1][1][2][1][1]

The firm is named after the researchers known as “Muckers” who worked in Thomas Edison’s labs, but it has no affiliation with Edison himself, his heirs, or his estate.⁠[3][4]

In March 2016, Santa Monica-based Mucker Capital announced the close of its $45 million third fund, Mucker III, which would continue to invest in software and services startups in the greater Los Angeles area, along with a new accelerator, MuckerLab, to invest in pre-seed companies. Co-founder Erik Rannala likened the first fund to a “friends and family round,” the second to a seed round that validated the firm’s core hypotheses, and Mucker III to a Series A. At the time, Mucker planned to invest $250,000 to $750,000 in seed rounds and to commit under $100,000 to MuckerLab participants.⁠[5][6][6][6][5][6]

Its early investments included The Black Tux, Surf Air, BloomNation, and Retention Science, and its portfolio company Trunk Club was later sold to Nordstrom.⁠[6]

On July 21, 2016, Mucker’s website launched a series of guest posts offering an “insider point of view” from portfolio companies; in the first, the online encyclopedia Everipedia presented the top trending pages on its site over the past week.⁠[7][7]

On December 6, 2017, Mucker’s website published a post opening with “Mucker portfolio company Everipedia,” announcing that Everipedia was creating an encyclopedia on the blockchain and that Larry Sanger, founder of the online encyclopedia Citizendium, had joined its executive team as Chief Information Officer. The new system was to reward users with tokens for curating articles, making editors stakeholders in the network.⁠[8][8][8][8]

In 2018, Mucker closed its fourth seed fund and raised a separate early-stage vehicle to invest in follow-on rounds for its pre-seed and seed companies and in other post-seed and early Series A opportunities, raising a little less than $90 million in total that year.⁠[2][2][2]

In December 2019, Omar Hamoui, a partner at Sequoia Capital for more than six years, joined Mucker as its third general partner, focusing primarily on post-seed and early Series A investments with checks of $2 million to $3 million. Mucker’s largest exit at that point was the Los Angeles shopping and rewards platform Honey: Mucker was Honey’s first investor, Honey had gone through its accelerator, and it was then acquired by PayPal for $4 billion in cash. Mucker also held stakes in companies including ServiceTitan, NEXT Trucking, Emailage, and AuditBoard.⁠[2][2][2][2]

Rannala said at the same time that Mucker was expanding its geographic scope to places where Silicon Valley investors had rarely invested, with recent investments in companies in Seattle, Ottawa, New Orleans, Austin, and San Diego.⁠[2][2]

As of October 2026, Mucker is headquartered in Los Angeles and invests in pre-seed, seed, and Series A internet software and services companies in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, and has added investment capacity in Austin and Toronto. The exits listed on its website include Honey, acquired by PayPal for $4 billion; ServiceTitan, which went public; and a company acquired by Hg for $3 billion.⁠[4][4][9][4][9][9][9]

The team page of its website lists Erik Rannala and William Hsu as co-founders and partners, along with partners including Omar Hamoui, Sanjiv Kalevar, Joe Tsai, Jon Broscious, and David Borcsok.⁠[10][10][10]

Mucker calls itself a “blue collar VC,” with partners working as operators deeply involved in portfolio companies’ product development, customer development, business development, recruiting, and fundraising, and continuing to advise founders for years after they move beyond Series A; it says it does not care where founders live, where they went to school, or whom they know. Unlike accelerators that churn through hundreds of startups every three months, MuckerLab works with no more than 20 to 25 companies a year, investing at the pre-seed stage as the first institutional capital and helping companies achieve product-market fit in preparation for institutional venture financing.⁠[5][4][4][4][11][11][11][11]

Mucker Capital: Official website: https://mucker.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/mucker (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mucker (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKMs1hnGlrodkdr7tW50Sww (opens in a new window)⁠[9]