Primary Venture Partners was founded in 2015 by Brad Svrluga and Ben Sun as a successor to High Peaks Ventures, built around a specific bet that crystallized after the 2008 financial crisis: New York's most talented people were shifting from Wall Street and Madison Avenue into startups, and the city needed a seed fund with genuine scale and hyper-local expertise to back them. The firm has become NYC's largest early-stage firm by operator headcount, with roughly 50 full-time staff and more than 20 dedicated platform operators embedded in portfolio companies on hiring, go-to-market execution, and follow-on fundraising - a deliberately builder-first model rather than a purely capital-first one. That approach produced early bets on Jet.com, acquired by Walmart for roughly $3.3 billion, and Mirror, acquired by Lululemon for $500 million, and Primary now manages approximately $1 billion, closing $425 million across two new funds in early 2024.
Jet.com's approximately $3.3 billion acquisition by Walmart in September 2016 - Brad Svrluga was an early investor via the firm's predecessor, High Peaks Ventures