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Mantis VC

1337 3rd Street 3rd Floor, Santa Monica, CA, 90401, United States

Overview

Mantis is an early-stage fund that invests in consumer tech, media/entertainment, and fintech companies. Mantis VC is a partnership between The Chainsmokers and experienced Venture Capital professionals and entrepreneurs Milan Koch and Jeffrey Evans that focuses on consumer technologies in the areas of Media and Entertainment, Fintech, and Health and Wellness. Founded in 2019, Mantis VC is based in Los Angeles, California.

Total investments
79
Lead investments
2
Investments · 12mo
15
Active investors
5

Sector focus

  • FinTech
  • Impact Investing
  • Media and Entertainment
  • Venture Capital
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Investment portfolio

  • Sandstone

    Participated · Series A · Jun 2026

    Sandstone focuses on the needs of in-house legal departments at small and mid-sized businesses, offering a platform that aggregates work from intake channels like Slack, email, and Jira and uses AI to route and triage requests. Users can build custom workflows on the platform to execute tasks such as drafting, reviewing, and providing legal analysis. The company's approach emphasizes relationship management and workflow automation tailored to the specific demands of in-house legal work rather than general legal reasoning systems. Sandstone positions itself as a vertical, specialized AI provider for legal teams and faces competition from both legal-focused startups and larger AI labs expanding into legal tools. The company recently raised a $10 million seed round in January and followed with a $30 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing disclosed funding to $40 million.

  • EDGE Markets

    Participated · Series A · Jun 2026

    EDGE Markets operates a banking platform focused on betting, gaming, and prediction markets, with its flagship product EDGE Boost — a Visa debit program and betting-only deposit account — offering FDIC insurance through Cross River Bank. Since launching about a year ago, EDGE Boost has processed over $2 billion in transactions and, per proprietary research, found 85% of high-value gaming users interested in tailored financial products. The company partners with ZeroHash to provide a compliant crypto-to-USD conversion path and separates gaming funds from everyday finances for users. EDGE Markets plans to roll out EDGE Pro, a high-throughput deposit and margin solution for market makers, and EDGE Connect, a payments rail engineered to lower transaction costs and eliminate chargebacks. To enable EDGE Pro functionality it is pursuing Introducing Broker and FCM registrations with the National Futures Association, and it will offer early access to EDGE Pro and EDGE Connect at no cost in 2026.

  • Rogo

    Participated · Series D · Apr 2026

    Rogo builds an enterprise-grade, agentic AI platform purpose-built for finance. The system acts as a thought partner for decision-makers, delivering deal stress-testing, investment framework generation, and client meeting preparation workflows. More than 25,000 professionals at institutions such as Rothschild, Jefferies, and Lazard actively use the software. Led by CEO Gabe Stengel and co-founder John Willett, the company positions its technology as an end-to-end solution embedded in critical financial workflows. The newly secured capital will support scaling the platform, widening deployments across global firms, and opening a London office to spearhead European expansion. Including the Series C, Rogo has now raised over $165 million, highlighting strong investor confidence in its growth trajectory.

  • Factory

    Participated · Series C · Apr 2026

    Factory develops autonomous artificial intelligence bots called Droids that perform coding tasks and can dynamically route work across different models such as OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude and China's DeepSeek depending on task complexity and customer preference. The company's model-agnostic approach is positioned as a selling point for enterprise customers, and reported clients include Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young and Palo Alto Networks. CEO and co-founder Matan Grinberg has highlighted the product's flexibility during recent outages at certain model providers. The company is privately held and was reported to be raising a financing at a $1.5 billion valuation. The article does not provide revenue, user metrics, founding year, or location information.

  • Depthfirst

    Participated · Series B · Mar 2026

    depthfirst develops an AI-native security platform called General Security Intelligence that reasons across code, infrastructure, and business logic to identify complex vulnerabilities and provide ready-to-merge fixes. The company introduced dfs-mini1, a security-focused model initially trained to secure cryptocurrency smart contracts and post-trained via reinforcement learning in security-specific environments. depthfirst reported that dfs-mini1 outperformed frontier models on OpenAI EVMBench while operating at 10x to 30x lower cost and that its approach appears to generalize to other security tasks. Since making products generally available in late 2025, depthfirst has partnered with customers including ClickUp, Lovable, Supabase, incident.io, and Moveworks. The platform has demonstrated strong developer adoption metrics, with 80% of its fix recommendations accepted and merged. depthfirst plans to use new funding to train more specialized models, grow its AI research team, and accelerate enterprise adoption.

Team

  • Jeffrey Evans

    Co-Founder & Partner

    LinkedIn
  • Milan K.

    Managing Partner

    LinkedIn
  • Drew Taggart

    Producer, The Chainsmokers & Investment Partner

    LinkedIn
  • Gaurav Bhogale

    Vice President

    LinkedIn