Dream Machine

We make
science fiction
non‑fiction.

An opportunistic seed fund backing founders at the edge of consumer behavior and frontier technology.

  1. The Thesis
  2. The Portfolio
  3. The Fund
  4. → Send an intro

The next decade of consumer is not a category. It’s a temperament.

Consumer, broadly defined

Social, creator, identity, audio, gaming, commerce. We are tech for normal people.

Frontier, narrowly held

The technology is only as interesting as the behavior it unlocks.

Founder, before product

Conviction in the person, patience with the form. Typical entry: pre-seed and seed.

Investments

Active
  1. Clubhouse
  2. Weekend
  3. Airbuds
  4. Fable
  5. Locket
  6. On Deck
  7. Kora Bio
  8. Clearspace
  9. TLDR
  10. TL;DL
  11. Mad Realities
  12. Snag
  13. Layer
  14. Micro
  15. Republic

Run by one person, on purpose.

Dream Machine is led by Alexia Bonatsos, former co-editor-in-chief of TechCrunch and an early reporter on WhatsApp, Uber, Instagram, Airbnb, and Pinterest.

She started the fund in 2018 to back the founders she would have written about, earlier.

The wheel of fortune is our monogram. Alexia used to write blog posts. Now she writes checks, hoping the wheel will turn in their favor.

The fund is small by design. No associate, no IC, no platform team. One investor, one inbox, one set of opinions, deployed slowly and with care.

  • Founded2018
  • StagePre-seed & Seed
  • Check size$250K–$500K
  • BaseSan Francisco

If you’re building something that feels too early, write to us.

Pitches are read by Alexia. No deck required for a first reply, a few sentences beat a forty-slide PDF.