Riot Ventures is a hard tech venture firm founded by Stephen Marcus and Will Coffield that invests from Los Angeles and Boston in companies modernizing critical industries. The firm launched its first fund, a $10 million vehicle, in 2017 to test the thesis that automation, artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics, and new materials would remake industrial sectors, and announced a $75 million second fund in February 2020. Riot invests from seed through growth and describes its team as devoted to a select group of iconic companies with checks of up to $200 million. The current portfolio of more than 30 companies spans defense, space, nuclear energy, robotics, and logistics, including Shield AI in AI pilots for defense aircraft, True Anomaly in orbital space defense, Valar Atomics in mass manufactured nuclear reactors, EnduroSat in satellite manufacturing, plus Oxide Computer, Parallel Systems, Lumafield, and Simbe Robotics. An early position in Toast, which completed a roughly $20 billion NYSE debut in September 2021, gave the small firm a realized public outcome unusual for a fund of its vintage and size. Riot Ventures is unrelated to Riot Games and to Riot Platforms, the bitcoin mining company that trades under the RIOT ticker.
Portfolio company Toast, the restaurant software platform, went public on the NYSE as TOST in September 2021 in a debut that valued the company at about $20 billion.