Daybreak is a New York-based pre-seed and seed venture firm founded in 2025 by Rex Woodbury, formerly of TPG Growth and Index Ventures and author of the Digital Native newsletter, which reaches 70,000+ weekly readers. The firm is built on a deliberate counter-thesis to the industrialization of venture: staying small, artisanal, and first-check focused, with genuine partner-level attention for every founder. With Fund II, Daybreak transitions from a solo-GP fund to a two-person partnership, opening a SoHo office designed as a gathering space for New York founders and builders.
Daybreak is sector-agnostic, backing AI-native founders across consumer and enterprise with ideas large enough to underpin $1B+ in revenue if they work.
Fund I portfolio spans healthcare, legaltech, insurance, restaurants, peptides, code generation, telecom, and animal health.
The firm identifies founders by archetype, The Missionary, The Savant, The Driver, The Nonconformist, rather than by sector or stage thesis.
Daybreak closed $100M across two vehicles in June 2026: Daybreak Fund II ($75M core fund) and Daybreak Meridian ($25M opportunistic follow-on vehicle).
Fund II is roughly a 3x step-up from the $33M debut fund closed in March 2025.
Fund I LPs included Screendoor, Spheres, Atacama Ventures, and Reference Capital. Fund II LP composition is not publicly disclosed.
Leadership
Rex Woodbury is Founder and Managing Partner, a Stanford graduate who built his investing career at TPG Growth and Index Ventures before launching Daybreak. He writes the Digital Native newsletter, which has become the firm's primary sourcing and brand engine, reaching 70,000+ founders, operators, and builders weekly.
Jared Newman is Partner, joining Daybreak earlier in 2026,. the first step in the firm's plan to add approximately one partner per fund until reaching a 3–5 person partnership at scale.
Investment Strategy
Daybreak writes first checks of $500K–$1M at pre-seed and seed, targeting 20–25 companies per fund. Meridian provides a dedicated follow-on pool to keep backing breakout portfolio companies without drifting into multistage investing.
Post-investment support focuses on sourcing specific inflection points, a founding engineer, an early customer, a pricing insight, rather than generic platform services.
The Digital Native newsletter functions as a proprietary sourcing engine, putting Woodbury's thinking in front of tens of thousands of founders before they have a pitch deck.
Notable Investments
United States
