Floodgate was built by Mike Maples Jr. and Ann Miura-Ko as a dedicated pre-seed and seed specialist, operating first as Maples Investments before taking the Floodgate name in March 2010. Its identity is less a narrow sector thesis than a willingness to hold conviction in breakout founders before anyone else will - Miura-Ko has written that she was told she was 'insane' to start the firm in the middle of the financial crisis, then gave birth to her second child, defended her Stanford PhD six weeks later, and was already on her way to making her first investment in TaskRabbit. That posture produced her best-known early bet, the Zimride seed round that became Lyft, and TechCrunch reported the firm at roughly $500 million in assets in 2022 alongside a recently closed $150 million fund.
Lyft's 2019 Nasdaq IPO - Ann Miura-Ko's seed bet in the company then known as Zimride is among the best-known pre-seed checks in venture capital