Welcoming Nathaniel Stummann to the byFounders Investment Team

Nathaniel Stummann has a soft spot for the early days. The awkward first versions. The 0 → 1 phase where nothing quite works yet and that is exactly the point.

He has spent his career in the part of startups where speed beats polish, learning beats planning and “we’ll fix it later” is a legitimate strategy. Having worked across operations, commercial and product, Nathaniel knows what it takes to turn a half-formed idea into something customers actually want to pay for.

From operator to founder to investor

Nathaniel started out at Danish startup Firmnav, working across functions before the company was acquired. He later joined Unhaze during its Y Combinator journey, getting a front-row seat to relentless iteration, very high standards and very little patience for excuses.

Later, he built his own company, Seedpoint, which was also acquired. Somewhere along the way, he collected the scars, instincts, and pattern recognition that only come from doing zero-to-one more than once and surviving it.

Today, Nathaniel brings that lived experience to byFounders, with a particular obsession for the questions that matter early. What is the actual problem here? Why should anyone care? And how fast can we find out if we are wrong?

What he’s excited about at byFounders

Nathaniel spends most of his time thinking about infrastructure, deeply integrated vertical AI and FinTech. These are areas where great tech is table stakes, and where distribution, defensibility, and timing often decide who wins.

When meeting founders, he looks for a unique worldview, meaning a take on an industry or workflow that makes you pause and think that it is oddly right. He looks for relentless execution, with consistent pace, clarity, and follow-through. Often intense, occasionally annoying, and almost always effective. And he looks for the courage to be contrarian, which is the ability to build something that looks wrong until it suddenly does not.

Nathaniel believes the best founders combine borderline unreasonable self-belief with genuine self-awareness, and focus on 10x outcomes rather than polishing 10 percent improvements.

“Going from 0 → 1 is about rapid iteration grounded in real customer understanding,” Nathaniel says. “Customers often cannot articulate what they want because they do not fully know yet. I look for founders who can break down what actually moves the needle, and who are deeply, almost unhealthily obsessed with the product.”

Beyond the pitch room

When he is not talking startups, Nathaniel is usually either playing the piano or running long distances, sometimes both in the same day. He is known to show up at the office with tired legs, a clear head, and a piano tune he cannot quite let go of.

If you are building in infrastructure, vertical AI, or FinTech, and you are deep in the 0 → 1 trenches, Nathaniel would love to hear from you.

You can reach him at nathaniel@byfounders.vc.

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