ANIMO

ANIMO Ventures is one of the few seed funds honest enough to tell you, up front, that it is not a water fund. Three Latin-American immigrants, Nico Berardi, Antonio Osio and Caro Acevedo, built it in Miami back in 2018 around a single promise they still print on the homepage, Founders Backing Founders, which in practice means staying a tiny general-partner-only shop, writing one of the first cheques into a young US company, and then being the most present investor that company has.

I track ANIMO in my Leviathan database as a generalist, and the label fits: it backs pre-seed and seed startups across software, fintech, digital health and consumer, only in the United States, and it likes to hunt in markets other coastal funds fly over, places like Seattle, Salt Lake City and its own Miami. With roughly 140 million dollars under management across two funds, ANIMO keeps the partnership deliberately small, writes among the first cheques into a company, and talks to its founders about every couple of days, which is the whole reason it refuses to hire associates or analysts.

The reason ANIMO Ventures turns up in a water database at all is one company, CREW Carbon, a Yale spin-out that does something genuinely clever: it runs carbon removal inside existing wastewater-treatment plants, dosing them with crushed alkaline minerals so the water leaves cleaner while the plant quietly locks away carbon dioxide as dissolved mineral. ANIMO has backed CREW twice, which for a fund that makes very few water bets is about as much conviction as its water file shows.

So the honest read, if you came here hoping ANIMO Ventures was a water specialist, is that it is not, and it would tell you so itself. ANIMO is a generalist that will write a water cheque when the founder and the market line up, and CREW Carbon is the proof that a fund with no water thesis can still end up backing one of the more interesting things happening inside a treatment plant. If ANIMO writes its next water cheque, expect it to look like CREW: a strong founding team first, the water second.