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Seven Harvard Business School students have created a fund for the Class of 2025 called Twenty25 Ventures and raised $1 million thus far to invest in founders from their graduating class over the next 10 years.
The Twenty25 team began working on raising money for the fund in the fall of 2023 and aims to leverage “community-based investing,” according to co-founder and second-year HBS student Yuval Efrat.
Instead of having a selective process to choose which companies to fund, Twenty25 Ventures automatically funds any applicants that meet their criteria. Any company that has a founder that is a member of the HBS Class of 2025, has already raised at least $500,000 in a round, and has institutional validation from an investor will receive money from the fund.
“There’s no specific area we’re looking at. As long as a founder in our class is able to do that, they will get a check,” Insoo Chang, co-founder and second-year HBS student, said.
There are currently no plans to fund non-profit organizations, academic research, grant proposals, or search funds, per the fund’s website.
Investment check size can range from $10,000 to $50,000, and founders that partner with Twenty25 Ventures have the opportunity to gain insight from an advisory board composed of HBS graduates and individuals from prominent VC funds.
Any member of the graduating class can contribute to the fund, and the Ventures team does not receive management fees or carried interest from the fund.
Efrat said the advisory board presents both the advisers and the participating founders with a “win-win” situation.
On the one hand, the advisers “get a connection to the best founders at HBS,” while the founders both “get their classmates on the cap table willing to help them with everything they need” and “get that list of advisers that are willing to help them with either advice on the fundraise, or maybe invest themselves, or even connect them to other VCs that might be interested,” Efrat said.
While this is the first time HBS students have organized their own fund to support their fellow classmates, other business schools have started similar programs. A similar student-run fund — launched in 2020 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business — served as inspiration for the Twenty25 team, according to Chang.
“The GSB folks at Stanford Business School have been incredibly helpful,” Chang said. “We’ve been connecting with the previous years to get this working.”
“One of the founders of the 2020 class fund, she actually started a company called PIN, which is called Power in Numbers — and we use that platform to set up our legal and fund structure as an investment club,” he said.
Chang said the communal confidence amongst the HBS Class of 2025 has made the process of creating a class fund much easier, and plans are already being formed to create student-run funds for the HBS Class of 2026.
“The community, alumni, professors, and classmates have been all in, super engaged, and they want to help build this together,” Chang said.
“Raising capital usually — fundraising — should be incredibly difficult,” Chang added. “But because we have so much confidence from our classmates, it hasn’t been too difficult.”
—Staff writer Graham W. Lee can be reached at graham.lee@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @grahamwonlee.
