Sunshine Lake

founders forge the future.

Global Pre-Seed & Seed Fund

Our founders rebuild critical global systems that failed them.

Balance restored.

Money

Trade

Work

Risk

Care

Energy

We connect founders around the world to the beating heart of Silicon Valley.

Don Stalter

Founder

Scaled Airbnb across EU and APAC in its earliest days, after CityDeal's sale to Groupon. First checks into numerous decacorns.

Ivan La Frinere-Sandoval

Partner, CFO & COO

Caltech- and Stanford-trained; SolarCity with Kimbal Musk, then his own Bay Area companies. Runs fund operations and the investment committee.

Suhail Younus

Partner

Runs the global coverage engine, sourcing and scoring thousands of startups a year. Cornell-trained in venture and frontier technologies.

Wieger Lamers

Platform Lead

Came up inside Adyen's rise to one of Europe's defining IPOs, then Valia and Antler's Unlock. Runs EMEA sourcing and platform from London.

Advisors & Venture Partners

Esther WojcickiGodmother of Silicon Valley; the family behind YouTube and 23andMe.

Mike FranklinCo-creator of Apache Spark and founding advisor at Databricks.

Andrew HovelsonBroadway actor alongside Tom Hanks and Glenn Close.

Jamie FeasterUnicorn founder, backed by Craft Ventures, Snoop Dogg, and top VCs.

Alex Bouaziz (Deel), Don, and Tarek Mansour (Kalshi) — Alex Bouaziz (Deel), Don, & Tarek Mansour (Kalshi)

Esther Wojcicki (Godmother of Silicon Valley)

Because our founders rebuild critical global systems, Sunshine Lake backs multiple blockbuster startups every decade.

What better time to build than when the world needs it most?

Sunshine Lake Portfolio

Every blockbuster begins as a founder's story.

Samuel Adeyemo

Duranta

Co-founded Aurora Solar and scaled it to $4B. Now building foundation vision models that let machines understand the physical world.

Kenya · Work

Geoffrey Tisserand & Anji Ismail

Concord.ai

Sold Agora to PayScale; helped build Checkr into a $5B company. Now reskilling the global workforce for the AI era.

France · Work

Thomas Dohmke

Entire

Ran GitHub to $7.5B and scaled Copilot. Now building the trust layer for the agent era, so the world can verify what machines build.

Germany · Work

Dowling, Segal & Coppa

FullSeam

Built TaxProper through to an Opendoor acquisition. Now an AI teammate for finance teams: AP, AR, and reconciliation.

US · Money

Craig O'Neill

Argentic

Led Versapay for nine-plus years through a take-private with Great Hill Partners. Now rebuilding B2B payments for the AI era.

Canada · Money

Our founders share the psychology that sparks movements.

Machines make their visions real faster than ever, and the old obsolete.

Forged by extreme origins Prescient Benevolent

He hustled harder for me than anyone else did. I want him to be part of every single round and company that I start.

Jake Sussman

Headway

It's rare to find investors who are killers on the business side. Would I work with Don again? The answer is I already did, twice.

Aaron Bai

Affiniti

Don has this incredible ability to believe in you more than you believe in yourself. I'd totally work with Don again.

Filip Kozera

Wordware

By Invitation

The Sunshine Lake Speakeasy

Where unicorn founders, Midas Listers, and world class, super human operators mentor the next generation of builders.

Enter the Speakeasy Submit your pitch Read the latest Sessions LinkedIn X

Sun·shine Lake \ ˈsʌnʃaɪn leɪk \ noun

A far away location where rare entrepreneurial beings are forged by extreme origins.

Origin: Star Wars: Ewoks #9.