Fellowship Spotlight: Parallel Venture Capital

As a third-generation U.S. military veteran, Parallel Venture Capital Founder and General Partner Nicholas Maynes has a deep personal connection to serving his country. This connection motivated him to launch a VC fund to invest in founders who’ve identified innovative technologies that have both government and commercial applications. “I can’t think of a better way to serve this country than helping the smartest minds to solve the hardest problems that our country is dealing with,” he says.

Parallel Venture Capital 

Parallel Venture Capital is a $25M pre-seed and seed stage fund investing in dual-use tech startups bridging government and commercial markets, with a focus on defense, AI, cybersecurity, and advanced materials. The fund is looking to write checks ranging from $500k - $1M to roughly 26 companies, with most investments being made at the pre-seed stage, reserving capital for a handful of Series A follow-on checks. 

Maynes has an experience-informed passion for identifying and catalyzing solutions that can benefit the areas his fund focuses on. While serving overseas in Iraq, he was in a position to advise and assist a local army in airstrikes against ISIS. “A lot of the time,” he shares, “the best technology we had could not distinguish the targets from civilians.” To create a less high-risk scenario, they repurposed the Amazon drones that the enemy was dropping on them to fly into buildings and gain a clearer view of targets versus civilians. 

This was an “a-ha” moment for Maynes. “Why could they get us with a $25 technology when I had a $4B technology?” he asked himself. “That was my first realization that military and government technology is slower to innovate, which leads to a gap in the military’s ability to address problems. I wondered why our best talent wasn’t solving these challenges, so I ended up creating a private sector solution to help solve them.” 

Motivated by a Desire for Meaningful Work

After being discharged, Maynes transitioned into consulting and then pivoted to work on two startups, while his co-GP, Ryan Holte, worked for a large defense technology company and a law firm after serving in the Air Force. After meeting on the HBS Rugby Team, the two discovered that they shared a desire to find greater meaning in their careers. “We didn’t really find as much meaning in our post-military work as we did in serving,” Maynes reflects, “and we decided to take a chance and launch our own fund.”

Without the kind of track record often required to succeed in the VC space, the pair decided that running an incubator would provide them with the experience and skills they needed to excel. This gave them the chance to build startups from the ground up and gain the rich learning that comes along with that work. “We’re not necessarily builders in the traditional sense ourselves, so we’re finding bright minds who want to help the country as a way to continue our service now that we’re not wearing the uniform anymore. The founders we’re investing in are creating solutions that could help the units we were just in.” 

Parallel Venture Capital primarily invests in US-based companies. Originally from Texas, Maynes went to West Point and UC Berkeley Haas School of Business before relocating to the Boston area to attend Harvard University, where he earned his MPA. When launching his VC fund, Maynes leveraged the benefits of living in a region with a high concentration of elite colleges and universities. “We’re trying to take the top talent at universities in the Boston and Cambridge area and redirect them toward U.S. government critical technology areas,” Maynes says. These are areas of concern, which the federal government publishes an annual list of, that range from manufacturing and materials to clean energy, AI, space technology, and quantum information sciences. “Instead of building another tech solution with only a commercial application,” Maynes explains, “we’d like them to build something beneficial for our country.”

Incubating Connections and Success

Parallel Venture Capital is stepping in to help founders do just that. “We’re showing the founders how to win government contracts and government funding to help them go from zero to one,” Maynes says, “so they can get their first one to two million to build a government solution, and also straddle the commercial sector.” In addition to capital and guidance, Parallel Venture Capital connects founders with senior directors within the government and the intelligence community to support problem scoping and determining a minimum viable product, thereby increasing the likelihood of success in developing solutions with both government and commercial applications.

Leveraging Government Connections

The team also has a strong and far-reaching network. The positioning that Maynes’ army relationships provide is further fortified by the connections of others on the team. Two of the fund’s advisors work in the intelligence community and have early insights on problems being elevated by the government as areas that will require solutions. And Holte was previously an Air Force acquisitions officer, which helped him gain expertise in the procurement cycle, specifically in how to sell to the government, a vital skill for companies working in this space.  

Maynes and his team are looking at several interesting and innovative companies working in this dual-use space. One of these companies aspires to break into the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) with software they have developed to optimize manufacturing facilities, while also attracting capital from non-governmental entities that stand to benefit from optimizing their own manufacturing spaces and processes. “They’ve gotten a lot of their revenue from commercial food producers,” Maynes shares, “and the software they built can also be used to optimize the DLA, which allows us to send parts and build ships, for example.”

Participating in the VC Include Fellowship

“Because our track record is very limited, it’s been a steep learning curve,” Maynes acknowledges. But he says that participating in the VC Include Fellowship has helped him tremendously as he navigates the unfamiliar terrain of raising and deploying a fund. “Even just understanding the lingo,” he says, “is a barrier to entry. Similar to the military and consulting, there’s a whole acronym soup that I wasn’t taught. I grew up in El Paso, and I didn’t even know what venture capital was.” 

He credits the fellowship with bringing him up to speed on learning that has historically been available only to those born into families or contexts with existing institutional access. “If you don’t know the language, no one’s going to trust you with their capital, so it makes a huge difference to be able to go into meetings and speak with confidence.”

Maynes also gains a great deal from his cohort and the broader community we’ve built around the fellowship. “It’s way more collaborative than it is competitive,” he says. He’s grateful to have a network of people to reach out to for direction, insights, and answers to essential questions. “It’s a hard journey, and a lot of people are already coming from the venture capital community,” he points out. “They had a big fund, they exited, they have a whole network already, and we’re a group that hasn’t done it yet, so it’s cool to go through it together.” 

Maynes’ lived experience as a veteran made him well-positioned to see opportunities that others might overlook. This was proven when he reached first close on the day of the Fellowship graduation. We look forward to seeing the ways Parallel Venture Capital continues to activate dual-use technologies that solve critical national challenges.