Floodgate Fund is a venture capital firm based in the United States created by Mike Maples Jr. and Ann Miura-Ko. It was originally named Maples Investments, but was renamed Floodgate Fund in March 2010.[1] It is focused on investments in technology companies in Silicon Valley.
In October 2021, Floodgate raised $146 million for its seventh fund. In previous years, their sixth fund closed at $131 million, their fifth fund closed at $76 million, the fourth fund closed at $75 million and their third fund at $73.5 million.[2]
Floodgate has invested in a number of companies[3] including Twitter, Digg, location-based services company Gowalla, professional networking service BranchOut,[4] [5] Chegg, Formstack, Milk Inc.,[6] TaskRabbit,[7] self-storage marketplace SpareFoot,[8] and seasteading platform company Blueseed.[9]
As of 2017, they've also invested in Lyft, Refinery29, LabDoor, education startup MissionU, legal discovery startup, TextIQ, Okta[10] and Rappi. Floodgate was also an early investor in Applied Intuition, a software company for autonomous vehicles.
In July of 2024, Mike Maples Jr and co-author, Peter Ziebelman, published the best-selling book, Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-ups Change The Future. Based on extensive research and real-world examples, the book upends accepted wisdom about how to achieve outlier success when launching a start-up or creating a new product. The book introduces new concepts like "Inflection Theory" and "Stress Tests", both of which are foundational to Floodgate's investment philosophy.
Floodgate Fund and Mike Maples have been covered in TechCrunch[1] and Forbes.[11] Mike Maples of Floodgate was also interviewed about his investment philosophy by Sarah Lacy for TechCrunch TV.[12]