Analysis
Pear VC, the San Francisco pre-seed and seed investor behind early bets on DoorDash and Gusto, closed its fifth flagship fund at $333 million, according to a Business Wire release distributed Wednesday. The close pushes the firm's total assets under management past $1.1 billion, and Pear used the announcement to promote three internal investors -- Arash Afrakhteh, Ajay Kamat and Shravan Reddy -- to general partner.
How Pear sources deals
Most of Fund V will go to new pre-seed and seed checks over roughly two and a half years, with the remainder reserved for follow-on investments in breakout portfolio companies. The firm's main sourcing engine is PearX, a twice-yearly pre-seed accelerator program that accepted under 1% of the more than 6,000 startups that applied to its Summer 2026 cohort. Pear says about 80% of PearX graduates go on to raise institutional seed rounds, some at valuations up to 10 times Pear's entry price, and its in-house talent team has facilitated more than 300 hires across the portfolio since inception.
“## What the raise doesn't prove An 80% seed-conversion rate and a sub-1% acceptance rate say more about Pear's selection process than about fund returns.”
Pear was founded in 2013 by Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson, who said in a joint statement that the new fund and the GP promotions mark "one of the most meaningful milestones" in the firm's history. Nozad framed the firm's ambition as "finding extraordinary founders first, before they become obvious to the rest of the market," while Hershenson argued that "capital is becoming commoditized" and "access is not" -- a pointed contrast with later-stage firms competing mainly on check size.
The track record behind the raise
Pear's named outcomes include DoorDash, Gusto, Vanta, Guardant Health and Affinity from its earlier vintages; more recently, Listen Labs has a definitive agreement to be acquired by Salesforce.
Two newer breakouts show the model still works at the growth stage: Forus raised a $150 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation led by Bain Capital Ventures, and Gravis Robotics raised a $200 million Series A.
Two PearX graduates -- Vals AI and Andera -- went on to raise $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz and $37 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, respectively, which is the kind of quick institutional validation Pear's model is built to produce.
The three new GPs map onto where Pear is placing its bets: Afrakhteh (enterprise and B2B, previously co-founder of Cariden Technologies, acquired by Cisco), Kamat (consumer, fintech and healthcare, previously CEO of Wedding Party after its acquisition by Instacart), and Reddy (AI infrastructure, robotics and vertical AI, previously co-founder of Pixelapse, acquired by Dropbox, and an engineering leader at Stripe).
What the raise doesn't prove
An 80% seed-conversion rate and a sub-1% acceptance rate say more about Pear's selection process than about fund returns. However, plenty of portfolio companies that raise a seed round still fail to return capital, and Pear's own marketing leans on a handful of marquee outcomes rather than fund-wide numbers. Seed valuations across the market have also been rising for two years, so a "10x entry price" mark today may not survive if that trend reverses before those companies exit.
At $1.1 billion in AUM, Pear is now large enough to lead growth-stage follow-ons in its biggest winners rather than handing that economics to later investors by default -- a shift that mirrors what other maturing early-stage firms have done as their own first funds grew into platforms.
