F&F Ventures Debuts $10M Fund With SHOPLINE For Consumer Brands
F&F Ventures launched a $10 million fund with SHOPLINE, pairing early-stage capital with commerce infrastructure for consumer brand startups.
F&F Ventures, the investment arm of the Founders & Funders community, has launched a $10 million fund dedicated to backing early-stage consumer brands, in partnership with global commerce platform SHOPLINE. The fund will invest across pre-seed through Series A rounds, targeting both consumer product companies and the technology infrastructure that supports them.
The Los Angeles-based effort is led by three general partners with prior operating experience in the consumer sector. Jeff Erickson, founder of Founders & Funders, previously scaled a consumer brand to eight-figure revenue before selling it to a private equity firm, and has since made angel investments in more than 40 companies. Co-founder Adam Shaw built a physical products company from zero to $18 million in revenue and has background in supply chain and private equity work. The third partner, Jian Tam, is a repeat consumer packaged goods entrepreneur with multiple prior exits, including as co-founder of ProteinWaffles.com.
Deal sourcing for the new fund draws on the Founders & Funders network, which has hosted more than 300 events across the United States and internationally over eight years. Part of that programming includes a series called VC ReversePitch, in which investors present their investment thesis and check size directly to founders, rather than the traditional format of founders pitching investors. That series is scheduled to run in several cities this fall, beginning in Denver on September 17, with additional stops planned in San Francisco and Los Angeles timed to Tech Week events hosted by venture firm a16z.
The fund’s existing portfolio already includes 13 consumer brands, spanning categories from food and beverage to travel gear and wellness products, among them Protein Waffles, NoLimit, See Sea, Link Luggage, OnGo Energy, Board Budder and G Box. Under the new arrangement, portfolio companies will also gain access to SHOPLINE’s commerce platform, which bundles storefront hosting, payment processing, marketing automation, customer loyalty tools and multichannel sales management into a single system. SHOPLINE, founded in 2013 and headquartered in Singapore, says it serves more than 700,000 merchants globally. Christopher Yang, the platform’s co-president, has joined F&F Ventures’ investment committee as part of the partnership.
The arrangement reflects a broader trend among venture investors in the consumer sector, where smaller funds increasingly differentiate themselves by offering operational resources alongside capital rather than competing purely on check size. As direct-to-consumer brands face rising customer acquisition costs and tighter margins, many early-stage companies now prioritize investors who can also provide infrastructure, distribution relationships or technical tooling that would otherwise require separate vendor contracts and integration work.
The ecommerce software sector itself has grown increasingly consolidated, with platforms competing to offer unified systems that combine storefront management, payments and marketing in place of the patchwork of point solutions many early brands historically cobbled together. For SHOPLINE, aligning with a venture fund gives it an early foothold with startups before they scale and evaluate competing platforms, while for F&F Ventures, the partnership offers portfolio companies a ready-made technical backbone during their most resource-constrained growth stage.
Erickson said the fund’s approach is centered on improving portfolio companies’ odds of success through more than financial backing alone. “We are already seeing the impact we are able to make working with our portfolio companies by leveraging our network connections, distribution channels, eCommerce expertise, experience, and relationships,” he said, according to the announcement.
This announcement was first reported by PR Newswire.
