The Venture Codex Logo

The Venture Codex

Contrary Capital

995 Market St, San Francisco, California, 94103, United States

Overview

Contrary is a talent and research-driven investment firm. We back a small number of exceptional people and the companies they build.

Total investments
44
Lead investments
7
Investments · 12mo
8
Active investors
5

Sector focus

  • Finance
  • Financial Services
  • Venture Capital
Visit website

Investment portfolio

  • FSH Technologies

    Participated · Series A · Aug 2026

    FSH Technologies develops end-to-end software for public-sector clients, targeting municipalities, school districts, and state agencies to modernize legacy government systems. The company emphasizes solving the whole procurement and change-management problem rather than only delivering software, and it avoids billable consulting hours and traditional sales or consulting teams—describing its staff as builders. FSH frequently competes with large consulting firms such as Accenture for government contracts and has reported winning bids against them. The founder and CEO, Lilly Chen, is a former Meta engineer who started the company after leaving Meta; reporting notes her personal background and leadership but does not specify the company's founding year. Financially, FSH has raised $25 million in total funding, including a $5 million seed and a $20 million Series A led by Lachy Groom. The articles do not provide revenue, user, or other operating metrics.

  • Shade

    Participated · Equity · Apr 2026

    Shade provides a cloud storage and collaboration platform tailored to agencies, sports media teams, brands, real estate firms, and podcasters, emphasizing natural-language search, auto-tagging, and video transcription that surfaces exact timestamps for matched scenes. Its streamable filesystem lets users mount cloud storage to a local filesystem and begin working on large files before full download, with options to pin files for low-bandwidth access. Collaboration features include timestamped feedback, attachable files in comments, multiple share links with permissions, and branded, password-protected collections with expiry for client deliveries. Pricing for small teams includes a $20 per seat per month plan with unlimited drives, unlimited AI indexing, and 500GB of active storage per seat, supporting up to 15 seats per workspace and 150 guests. Shade faces competitors such as Poly and Memories.ai and plans to extend search across images, videos, and documents and to build a no-code workflow automation layer. The company has raised $20 million in total to date.

  • Doss

    Participated · Series B · Mar 2026

    DOSS offers an AI-native Operations Cloud designed to sit alongside existing general ledgers and legacy systems, enabling procurement, inventory, and order workflows to self-configure and adapt in real time via natural language. Its platform leverages a composable data model and an AI copilot called Dossbot to reduce the lengthy, rigid implementations typical of traditional ERPs. The company targets operationally complex sectors including retail, wholesale, and manufacturing and serves customers such as Verve Coffee Roasters and Mezcla. With the $55M Series B, DOSS plans to deepen its unified data model, accelerate agentic systems that automate operational configuration, and expand its platform to support transitions from static ERPs to adaptable systems of action. The business is led by a team of enterprise software veterans and recently added Madrona's Karan Mehandru to its board.

  • Corgi

    Participated · Series A · Jan 2026

    Corgi is an AI-native, full-stack insurance carrier founded by Emily Yuan and Nico Laqua and headquartered in San Francisco. As a licensed carrier, it designs and manages insurance end-to-end and uses AI to power underwriting, policy management, and claims operations. The company launched its platform after receiving regulatory approval in July 2025 and initially focused on property-management insurance for startups. Corgi plans to expand its product suite into new verticals including trucking, payroll, and small-business insurance while broadening coverage and distribution. Financially, Corgi has raised over $268 million to date, including a $160 million Series B at a $1.3 billion valuation. The company is investing the new capital in AI systems, faster quoting, adaptive risk models, and operational scaling to support its growth plans.

  • Valar Atomics

    Participated · Series A · Dec 2025

    Valar Atomics is developing advanced nuclear reactors intended for scalable deployment and is pursuing clusters of small reactors—sometimes called "gigasites"—to serve high-demand users such as data centers and manufacturing. Founded in 2023 and based in California, the company is also exploring applications beyond grid electricity, including producing synthetic fuels and supplying industrial heat. Its technology and commercial approach target energy-intensive industries and the growing electricity needs driven by AI infrastructure. Financially, Valar recently raised approximately $450 million (about $340 million equity and $110 million debt) at a reported $2 billion valuation, following a prior $130 million raise in 2025. The company is backed by defense-tech investors including Palmer Luckey and Shyam Sankar.

Team