Top Down Ventures Seeks Frequent Flyer Founders
The venture capital firm for MSP software makers is looking for AI startups led by people willing to log serious miles meeting MSPs face to face.
Recent coverage elsewhere told us what discerning buyers of MSPs are looking for these days. What about discerning buyers of vendors for MSPs?
Few know better than Chris Day, founder and chairman of Top Down Ventures, a venture investor exclusively focused on MSP software makers that recently closed its first fund at an oversubscribed $28 million, an amount big enough to get the firm in front of a lot of young software companies.
“I feel like there’s no new startup that we don’t get to look at,” Day (pictured) says.
Not surprisingly, most of those startups these days are doing something AI-related.
Actually, scratch that. All of them are.
“In the last five months, I’m not sure that we’ve looked at anything that’s not,” Day says.
“Everything is either directly on the agentic side, like workflow automation and agentic automation, or on the orchestration side or the observability side of AI.” The quality of their code isn’t what most motivates Top Down to invest, he adds.
“Code is now free,” Day says. “You can write 10,000 lines of code in five minutes.” Great founders are harder to produce, which is why founder quality matters even more than it already did at present. According to Day, the money to be made at the intersection of AI, MSP, and SMB is attracting more high-quality founders than ever.
“We’re seeing more Bay Area-style entrepreneurs, real solid engineering mindset folks, coming out,” he says.
Engineering know-how isn’t the most important attribute in a founder, though, according to Day. The more time people spend on Teams, Zoom, and webinars, he notes, the less effective those tools have become as sales vehicles.
“I think over the next few years, channel events are going to become the best way to get in front of folks,” Day says. Top Down wants people willing to log a lot of miles attending them.
“Not every founder wants to do that, but the ones we’ve invested in are all hustlers,” Day says. “They’re ready to get out there.”