JDF Ventures is small and deliberately quiet. Since 2015 we've worked with people running small and medium businesses in the places we visit — with capital, equipment, advice, or just time, depending on what they actually need. We don't put our name on any of it.
Every marker is a place we've actually spent time — thousands of places across 31 countries, pulled from our travel itinerary rather than a list we wrote down afterwards.
Not every one of these is somewhere we helped. As we travel we see opportunities in these locations. But we've never helped anyone we didn't meet in person, so everywhere we've worked is somewhere on this map.
Drag the globe to turn it. Hover a marker to see the place.
There's no grant cycle and no field office. We travel, we spend time in places, and we meet people who are building something — a shop, a boat, a workshop, a small farm, a service someone's family depends on.
When we can help, we do. Sometimes that's capital. Sometimes it's a piece of equipment that was the actual bottleneck. Sometimes it's sitting down with someone for two days and working through what they're stuck on. The form the help takes is whatever the person in front of us needs, not whatever we happen to have a program for.
We've been doing this since 2015.
We don't publish who we've worked with, what we gave, or how it turned out. We do more than just invest in them. We put ourselves in — our time, our judgement, and our full conviction that these people will make it work. They do. And when they do, the credit is theirs.
This makes for a thin website. We're aware of that, and we like it that way. We'd rather have a thin website than turn someone's livelihood into a case study.
What we can show you is where we've been.
A community isn't one industry. The water people drink, the work they do, and the stories they keep are the same system — so we look across all of it rather than picking a lane.
These are the areas we know something about. If what you're building sits outside them, tell us anyway.
The physical things a place needs to work: power, water, storage, shelter, and moving goods from one place to another.
People who already have the ability, matched with the tools. Schooling, training, and health care that actually reaches them.
Connection, and keeping what's yours yours. Getting a business reachable without handing over its data.
Ownership and access to money — titles, lending, payments, insurance. The unglamorous machinery a business runs on.
Culture, craft, and the things that make somewhere worth staying. The measure of whether any of the rest worked.
Most of what we do starts with meeting someone. But we don't get everywhere, and if you're running a business that's stuck on something specific, we'd rather hear about it than not.
We read everything that comes in. We can't fund most of it, and we won't pretend otherwise — but a short, direct description of what you're building and what's in the way is the thing most likely to get a reply.
Useful to tell us:
We respect your intellectual property. By submitting a proposal you're sharing information for the sole purpose of investment review. Your executive summary, business model, and technical details remain entirely your property.
We invest in founders. We don't take their ideas.
We read every submission ourselves, so a reply may take a few weeks rather than a few days.