Corazon Capital
1322 West Henderson Street, Chicago, IL, 60657, United States
Overview
Born out of a love for building startups and a passion for backing entrepreneurs with heart, Corazon Capital (spanish for “heart”), a leading Chicago-based venture fund, brings a coastal approach to Seed and Series A investing. With a rare blend of investing experience and operating expertise, Corazon provides unusually pragmatic, actionable counsel to the entrepreneurs it supports. Corazon believes that the best entrepreneurs and the smartest VCs will intentionally solicit both financial and operating investors in their syndicates, with Corazon recognized across geographies for its deep operating knowledge and reach inside and outside of Chicago. Corazon’s co-founders, Sam Yagan and Steve Farsht, have accomplished track records as investors and operators. Sam co-founded SparkNotes, eDonkey, and OKCupid before posting up as CEO of Match Group (NASDAQ: MTCH) through its IPO, and most recently taking the reins as the CEO of Shoprunner. As a General Partner at Norwest Equity Partners, Steve participated in its growth from five to twenty-five investment professionals. He honed his operating chops as CEO of DCM Services, an NEP portfolio company. After moving to Chicago, Steve immersed himself in the startup ecosystem, first as COO of Tap.me and then co-CEO of Techstars Chicago. Upon launching its second fund, Corazon added Phil Schwarz, the former CMO of Tinder, where he was responsible for growth, brand and retention marketing on a global basis. Previously, Phil was Head of Growth Initiatives at Match Group and co-founder of the Kaplan/Techstars EdTech accelerator. Together, Corazon’s principals have founded six companies through to four exits, served as CEOs of companies worth over $5 billion (including taking a company public), executed over $1 billion in acquisitions, invested in excess of $300 million in private companies, and held over 30 board seats.
- Total investments
- 51
- Lead investments
- 13
- Investments · 12mo
- 3
- Active investors
- 8
Sector focus
- Finance
- Financial Services
- Venture Capital
Investment portfolio
- Rime
Participated · Series A · Jul 2026
Founded in 2022 by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos, Rime develops voice AI models tuned for enterprise phone calls. The company operates a recording studio in San Francisco to collect conversational data rather than relying on web-scraped audio and employs a phoneme-based architecture to adapt pronunciations and brand-specific terms. Rime started with separate pipelines for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and an LLM but is shifting focus toward speech-to-speech models to reduce latency, improve turn-taking, and handle background noise. It serves customers across food service, healthcare, airlines, and fintech and counts Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion among its enterprise clients. The startup has about 35 employees and recently hired Rafael Valle as Chief Scientist to strengthen its audio understanding and model work. Rime says its training approach helps increase customer call duration, which it credits with winning enterprise contracts.
- BoldVoice
Participated · Series A · Jan 2026
BoldVoice offers a mobile platform that pairs real-time, phoneme-level pronunciation feedback from proprietary speech models with video lessons from expert accent coaches. The service targets the more than one billion professionals who rely on English at work but face career limitations due to accent and clarity issues. Priced far below traditional $200-$300 per-hour coaching, the app gives users unlimited, on-demand practice. The company has surpassed five million downloads, serves professionals in over 150 countries, and recently exceeded $10 million in annual recurring revenue—all with a team of just seven employees. Founded by Anada Lakra and Ilya Usorov, BoldVoice plans to use new capital to accelerate global expansion and develop additional AI-powered coaching capabilities and proprietary speech models. The app is available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, and the company is actively hiring across growth, product, and engineering roles.
- Noble Mobile
Led · Seed · Sep 2025
Noble Mobile is an MVNO founded by entrepreneur Andrew Yang that resells wireless service on T-Mobile’s network. The startup offers a single $50-per-month plan with unlimited talk, text and 5G data, but returns roughly $1 in "Noble Cash" for every gigabyte a subscriber stays under a 20 GB monthly threshold. By turning lower data use into direct savings, the company hopes to align customer incentives with reduced screen time and undercut the U.S. average wireless bill of $83. Yang modeled the business on Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs approach, keeping prices low by buying network capacity wholesale instead of operating its own infrastructure. The company has hosted “no-phone parties” in Los Angeles and New York to build community and test interest in its digital-wellness message. Noble Mobile attracted $10.3 million in seed financing to fund product rollout and customer acquisition. No user or revenue figures have yet been disclosed, but the fresh capital provides runway to scale marketing and operations.
- Nara Organics
Participated · Equity · Jul 2025
Nara Organics produces an organic, whole-milk powdered infant formula that it says contains the highest percentage of milk fat and the lowest percentage of plant-based oils of any formula sold in the U.S. The formula is free from palm oil, soy, corn syrup, maltodextrin and GMOs and meets both European and U.S. safety standards; the company is FDA-registered and USDA-certified. Nara chose to manufacture in Germany with a partner whose process seals cans in an oxygen-free chamber, a capability the company says reduces contamination risk and improves shelf life. The product is sold direct-to-consumer on its website and mobile app, with a starter bundle (2 cans) priced at $36 and subscription options of 4 cans for $136 or 6 cans for $243 every four weeks; each can makes about 25 four-ounce bottles. Founder Esther Hallam developed the formula over seven years with scientists and pediatric nutritionists and launched a companion mobile app in 2018 to help parents track feeding and care. As part of its launch the company is donating over 1,400 cans to the Good+ Foundation.
- iAsk Ai
Led · Seed · Oct 2024
iAsk is an advanced, free AI search engine that enables users to ask questions in natural language and receive instant, detailed answers. It uses transformer neural networks and reports top accuracy scores on gold-standard academic benchmarks, and the company says it delivers better results than ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Claude.ai. iAsk emphasizes accuracy and sourcing from authoritative content to avoid the back-and-forth typical of chatbots. Since launching last year, the platform has processed over 350 million searches and receives up to 1.5 million searches per day; the company is on pace to exceed half a billion searches by the end of 2024. iAsk has soft-launched an API for businesses and developers and reports a waitlist of more than 7,000 unique potential customers. The product was named Best Search Engine of 2024 by Slashdot.