Fortitude Ventures

Fortitude Ventures is an early stage venture firm based in San Francisco. We partner with ambitious founders leveraging AI, robotics, and frontier technologies to advance how we live and work.

Investment Thesis

We believe we are at an inflection point where AI systems are transitioning from pure software applications to embodied intelligence that can sense, reason, and act in both digital and physical environments.

We invest in pre-seed and seed stage companies, typically writing initial checks between $500K–$1M. We believe the best founders are technical operators who deeply understand both the problem space and the cutting-edge research that makes new solutions possible.

Our conviction is that the companies building the picks and shovels for autonomous systems, whether software agents or physical robots, will create outsized value over the next decade.

Portfolio Companies

  • Autonomous healthcare systems for remote and underserved populations.
  • Enabling the autonomy of creative economies through AI-powered licensing and distribution.
  • Enabling conversational AI agents.
  • Autonomous cancer ablation.
  • Autonomous home design.
  • Enabling manufacturing autonomy.
  • Enabling radiology autonomy.
  • Autonomous compliance and risk management for financial services.
  • Autonomous robotic spacecraft for on-orbit servicing, inspection, and defense.
  • Autonomous transaction paperwork for realtors.
  • Autonomous seaplanes for maritime transportation.
  • Autonomous robotic testing & simulation.
  • Autonomous decision systems powering the next generation of defense operations.
  • Enabling the autonomy of school districts to make data-driven decisions.
  • Autonomous underwater drones for defense & intelligence.

Team

Sungjoon Cho Managing Partner
Sungjoon Cho

An engineer by training, Sungjoon was deeply involved in the last computing paradigm shift as a technical PM of Samsung's mobile SOC processors in the late 2000's. After a stint as a consultant at McKinsey, Sungjoon has spent the last decade as an early stage VC at firms like Formation 8, Amasia, and D20 Capital, where he focused on Applied AI startups and backed entrepreneurs building important companies leveraging computer vision, multimodal machine learning, and robotics.

Sungjoon Cho
Joan Kim Principal
Joan Kim

Joan brings six years of early stage investing experience, most recently at Samsung Next. She began her career as a Structured Finance Analyst at Moody's Investors Service before joining the Corporate Strategy & Operations team at Flextronics International, a global leader in advanced manufacturing and supply chain management.

Joan Kim

Advisors