Contrary is a

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

-based

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

firm. Formed in 2016, the firm invests across early stage companies in North America and

India India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...

. Select investments from the firm include

DoorDash DoorDash, Inc. is an American company that operates an online food ordering and food delivery platform. The company is based in San Francisco, California. It went public in December 2020 on NYSE and trades under the symbol DASH. With a 56% ma ...

, Anduril,

Ramp An inclined plane, also known as a ramp, is a flat supporting surface tilted at an angle from the vertical direction, with one end higher than the other, used as an aid for raising or lowering a load. The inclined plane is one of the six clas ...

Zepto A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decadic. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol. The pre ...

, and

Vise A vise or vice (British English) is a mechanical apparatus used to secure an object to allow work to be performed on it. Vises have two parallel jaws, one fixed and the other movable, threaded in and out by a screw and lever. A vise grip is ...

Background

The firm was founded by Eric Tarczynski in 2016. During that year, Tarczynski drove across the United States recruiting "venture partners" involved in the startup ecosystem. More than 50 universities were represented by venture partners by early 2017. For his work founding Contrary, Tarczynski was awarded the 2022

Forbes 30 Under 30 ''Forbes'' 30 Under 30 is a set of lists of people under 30 years old issued annually by ''Forbes'' magazine and some of its regional editions. The American lists recognize 600 business and industry figures, with 30 selected in twenty industries ...

honor in the Venture Capital category. Investors in Contrary include

Tesla Tesla most commonly refers to: * Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), a Serbian-American electrical engineer and inventor * Tesla, Inc., an American electric vehicle and clean energy company, formerly Tesla Motors, Inc. * Tesla (unit) (symbol: T), the SI-d ...

co-founder

Martin Eberhard Martin Eberhard (born ) is an American inventor, engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Tesla, Inc. (then Tesla Motors) with Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Eberhard served as Tesla's original chairman, and its CEO until late 2007. In 2015, he was i ...

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news news aggregator, aggregation, Review site#Rating site, content rating, and Internet forum, discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") subm ...

co-founder

Steve Huffman Steve Huffman, also known by his Reddit username spez (), is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, a social news and discussion website, which ranks in the top 20 websites in the world. He also co- ...

Twitch Twitch may refer to: Biology * Muscle contraction ** Convulsion, rapid and repeated muscle contraction and relaxation ** Fasciculation, a small, local, involuntary muscle contraction ** Myoclonic twitch, a jerk usually caused by sudden muscle co ...

co-founder

Emmett Shear Emmett Shear (born 1983) is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platforms Justin.tv and Twitch. He is the chief executive officer of Twitch and is also a part-time partner at venture capital firm ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

CEO

Parag Agrawal Parag Agrawal (; born 21 May 1984) is an Indian-American software engineer who was the CEO of Twitter, Inc. from November 2021 to October 2022. He was fired, along with three other top executives, on October 27, 2022, following Elon Musk’s pu ...

Meta Meta (from the Greek μετά, '' meta'', meaning "after" or "beyond") is a prefix meaning "more comprehensive" or "transcending". In modern nomenclature, ''meta''- can also serve as a prefix meaning self-referential, as a field of study or ende ...

Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, and

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

COO Erica Brescia.

Investments

Contrary's current investments include

, Anduril, Ramp, Vise, Kyte, Maev, Memora Health, Check, Stytch, Hallow, Parfait, and Zepto among others. In October 2018, Contrary announced a $2.2 million Fund I. In July 2020, the firm announced Contrary Talent, a network of engineers, designers, product managers, and operators. The network supports members through job opportunities, career development, and funding should they start a company. In July 2020, Contrary launched Gap Year, a program that gave select founders $100,000 each given they took leave of absence from their university to start a company. This program incubated Zepto, a grocery delivery company based in India. Zepto has since raised $160 million, including funding from

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

and

Breyer Capital James W. Breyer (born July 26, 1961) is an American venture capitalist, founder and chief executive officer of Breyer Capital, an investment and venture philanthropy firm, and a former managing partner at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. B ...

. In October 2021, Contrary announced a $20 million Fund II. Five months later in March 2022, Contrary announced that they had closed a $75 million Fund III.

References

{{Venture capital firms Venture capital firms Venture capital firms of the United States Companies based in San Francisco Financial services companies established in 2016 2016 establishments in California