Max Altman Raises $125 Million For Seed-Stage VC Firm Saga Ventures

Investors Thomson Nguyen and Ben Braverman were interviewing with big venture capital firms about potential roles last September when they met in San Francisco to discuss a different option: teaming up with Max Altman.

Younger brother to Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) with Jack Altman (former CEO of Lattice), Max had spent nearly a decade investing alongside them through funds Hydrazine Capital, Apollo Projects and Altman Capital. But he’d left San Francisco for Austin, Texas, in part to get some breathing room from the family name, and now, he wanted to branch out with a new firm.

Braverman, the former chief revenue officer at logistics unicorn Flexport, and Nguyen, an entrepreneur who’d recently sold his second startup, had both made smaller investments through Flexport and the Y Combinator network. With Altman, they’d get to be cofounders, while still leveling up their dealmaking and check sizes.

The result is Saga Ventures, a $125 million fund focused on early-stage software startups led by Altman, Braverman and Nguyen as general partners. Saga plans to invest around $2 million to $2.5 million across 30 companies with the fund, its partners told Forbes, leading or co-leading early-stage rounds.

Saga’s strategy isn’t reinventing the wheel: the partners plan to invest in classic software-as-a-service startups in categories like work software and fintech, building off combined past investments such as manufacturing startup Hadrian, finance software maker Ramp and space-based drug developer Varda. AI, unsurprisingly, is another area of interest. But where Saga hopes to approach venture a bit differently is to focus on applications for people outside the tech set. “The low hanging fruit today is using technology, which today is AI, and applying it to really hard problems that are going to affect every American,” Altman told Forbes. “You have to build a tool that someone in Houston or Minneapolis is going to be able to use.”

After interning as a Duke undergraduate for Steve Anderson, the former Midas List investor, Altman was hired as one of the first product managers at Zenefits. While at the human resources software startup, Altman was known for arguing that tech companies shouldn’t build products just for other tech companies, said former CEO Parker Conrad. “He was always pushing the position that you need to build for businesses across the country,” Conrad said.

That approach took more of a backseat for a time, however, at Hydrazine Capital, where Altman joined older brother Sam to help manage his expanding venture fund. They would back a number of early Y Combinator companies, including social media site Reddit and smart email service Superhuman, as well as Conrad’s next venture, Rippling, where Max Altman briefly took a job. (Those funds are a big reason that Forbes called Sam Altman a billionaire earlier this year.)

As the older Altman spent more time on OpenAI, Max Altman increasingly managed its day-to-day operations, an arrangement they continued with Apollo Projects, another family affair that looped in Jack Altman. Apollo Projects was supposed to focus on moon shots and deep tech bets, they told Forbes in 2020. But it soon expanded into more traditional software companies, in part because of the high-cost, long-horizon nature of such ventures.

With OpenAI’s growth pushing Sam Altman to minimal involvement, Jack Altman and Max Altman next launched Altman Capital, a fund with outside capital that was often mistaken for a family office. Eventually, working full-time as brothers was proving more baggage than fun. On a recent visit by their mother for Passover, Jack and Max Altman were discussing a co-investment opportunity when Jack declared the topic off-limits during family time. “We shut up about a very live deal for 24 hours,” Max Altman said. “That’s just not a great way to live your life.”

Altman’s alternate path began in 2021, when he stayed at a pandemic ‘bubble’ house in New York with some other tech-sector folks including Braverman. The two became friends as Braverman, Flexport’s former CRO, saw his role shift to deploying tens of millions of capital in strategic investments for the company as its ventures lead. At a separate tech confab in Hawaii, Altman befriended Nguyen, who sold fintech startup Nearside to Plastiq in 2022 and was a prolific angel investor within the Y Combinator community. (Nguyen’s previous startup, Framed Data, went through YC the same year as Flexport in 2014 before being acquired by Square.)

When the possibility of working together as a trio emerged, the three investors decided they had the rapport and complementary skill sets and networks for a lasting fund. (Nguyen plans to remain in San Francisco, Altman in Austin and Braverman in New York.) After spending the fall discussing their options — The Information previously reported on those talks — they decided that a relatively smaller fund with a concentrated investment portfolio would give the best chance for success.

Their different strengths have proven helpful already at several startups backed by two or more of the partners, those companies’ CEOs said. At business-to-business payments startup Slope, CEO Lawrence Murata, a Forbes 30 Under 30 list alum alongside cofounder Alice Deng, said he had leaned on Nguyen early on for fintech experience, such as setting up risk models; Altman, an investor alongside his brothers, helped with high-value customer and investor calls. Murata is now emailing with Braverman, too, on go-to market strategy and hiring. “We’re excited about them working together,” Murata said. “We’re already sending them other startups.”

Transportation payments startup AtoB previously took separate investments from all three of Saga’s partners; CEO Vignan Velivela told a similar story of Nguyen helping with fintech expertise, Altman with connections, and Braverman with setting up sales. “They genuinely care, and that really stands out,” Velivela said.

As for whether Saga can stand out among other seed funds, established investors who have worked with the fledgling firm’s partners said they looked forward to working with Saga. At Khosla Ventures, partner Keith Rabois said he’d once tried to hire Altman, and believed his head for business fundamentals and lack of interest in tech industry hype would serve the firm well. At Founders Fund, partner Trae Stephens, a Flexport investor, said Braverman had been a big part of the company’s personality, and now gave his firm another trusted in-network fund source for startup deal flow. And at Kleiner Perkins, partner Ilya Fushman, who previously invested in Nguyen’s startup, said his experience launching and selling two startups was rare among venture capitalists. “Across the three of them, they span a lot of different domains,” Fushman said.

Much of what Saga Ventures does won’t look so different from many other seed venture funds, of course. “Max will do some of the same things as anyone else,” Sam Altman told Forbes. “But he will also work on these companies where the target market is every American, building for and in places that Silicon Valley often overlooks.”

For each of Saga Ventures’ general partners, the opportunity represents a step into bigger opportunity and risk. “Rationally, we are moving up to the big leagues,” Braverman said. “You really have to like the people you’re co-founding something with,” added Nguyen.

Altman, meanwhile, is eager to prove himself with chosen partners of no blood relation, with the added motivation of now competing, at least partially, with his siblings for best startup investment returns. “There’s nothing that pushes me more than to prove that the three of us can do this together,” he said.