Yale Hacker House Portfolio Companies Raise $17,000,000
As of this morning, founders in the Yale House have raised over $17,000,000 in funding from firms including Caffeinated Capital, Abstract Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, and other firms & angel investors.
August 2025 — I called Oliver & Leïa to discuss the lack of community that Yale founders face in SF.
We had a crazy idea: find a house in San Francisco for Yale students to pursue their most ambitious ideas. For some of us, that meant founding companies.
People thought this ‘hacker house’ idea was crazy. How could we possibly afford a house in San Francisco? How would we find a large enough home for 15 Yale students? Who would help fund the programming & rent? How would we find the right talent? What qualities would we select for?
Over the next semester, we hosted dinners & events on campus through the Yale Entrepreneurial Society. We had the opportunity to get to know Yale students ideating on how to solve problems across biology, agriculture, aerospace, and logistics.
The right people rose to the surface. People with untraditional backgrounds and a right to win.
The first person from Mozambique to attend Yale: We met Rodrigues, and he shared his passion for art. We later learned that he was an award winning photorealistic artist.
We met Murad in May. He grew up farming in Uzbekistan—and when he got access to WiFi for the first time at 14, it changed his life… The only thing was that each time he wanted to connect to the internet, he had to climb up a tree with an antenna on his back.
As we continued meeting students at Yale, we saw a pattern: the people exploring the most interesting ideas were motivated by their personal experiences with the problems they were solving.
Ariyan grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. The great-grandson of a Ugandan businessman, Ariyan heard stories of how his grandfather was imprisoned by the government of Idi Amin and deported.
Ariyan met his co-founders Kushal & Ron in high school. They had a mutual friend who struggled with low vision so they took the problem into their own hands. Fast forward 3 years: they have interviewed hundreds of low vision individuals, partnered with leading organizations in the space, and built an app PATH, which just launched on the App Store.
As a sophomore, James was on the verge of finishing up his mathematics degree. He walked into Kline Tower to show up for the first day of everyone’s favorite class: Measure Theory(!), only to find out he had walked into a course on Orbital Mechanics. Awkwardly realizing that he was in the wrong class, James thought about making a run for it. The only issue was that there was a grand total of 4 people in the room: the professor and 3 masters students. He knew he was in for a ride. What he didn’t quite know at that time, however, was that 7 months later he would raise his 3.2M in pre-seed funding for his company, NADE, to build the satellite fault detection software to secure assets in space and build enduring space infrastructure.
As we continued getting to know innovators on campus, we knew we needed the support of the Yale community. We pitched the idea to @annimaniac, and she believed in us. A few months later, we met @tonsing and he was immediately in.
Beyond this being a story about Yale students, this is a story about resilience. A story about how the people who have the most to fight for win. Resilience, fervor, vision, taste, judgement, creativity. These are the qualities that matter in the next generation of founders building the future of American infrastructure.
Thank you to Cydney Hayes at Gazetteer SF for covering our story.