Sky9 Capital is a global venture capital firm with $2B in AUM and a dedicated strategy through Sky9 Digital, focused on AI and blockchain-enabled financial infrastructure. The firm’s fintech portfolio includes Webull and FinVolution, and it has presence in Beijing, Boston, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Singapore. Sky9 backs finance technology founders from the earliest stages, supporting companies with global ambition from day one.
Pre-seed for fintech is a more constrained market than it looks. Plenty of VC funds list fintech as a sector they invest in. Fewer have the pattern recognition to help you navigate the things that actually determine whether a fintech startup survives its first two years: the compliance architecture decisions you make at pre-seed, the banking relationships you’ll need before you can launch a product, and the proof points your Series A investors will require before they take the meeting.
If you’re raising pre-seed for a finance technology company, here’s how to think about which investors are actually worth prioritizing.
The compliance problem most pre-seed fintech founders underestimate
Before you’ve raised a seed round, you’ll face a set of decisions that don’t have clean answers: which regulatory framework to build under, whether to pursue a bank charter or a BaaS partnership, how to structure your data practices given the compliance requirements of your target customer, and which jurisdictions to launch in first.
These decisions are often expensive and time-consuming to unwind later. A fintech company that chooses the wrong compliance architecture at pre-seed doesn’t just face a fine later. It faces a restructuring that slows the product roadmap, complicates the next fundraise, and in some cases requires unwinding commercial agreements it’s already signed.
Most generalist investors at the pre-seed stage can’t help with this. They can ask questions about it, but they don’t have the pattern recognition from having seen enough fintech companies make these choices. The investors who are genuinely useful here have backed multiple fintech companies through the same set of decisions, seen which paths led to structural problems at Series A, and can give you an informed point of view on the tradeoffs.
That kind of value is different from simply having a recognizable brand or being willing to write the first check. It’s also harder to assess from a pitch meeting, which means you have to ask directly.
What pre-seed fintech looks like in practice
Pre-seed for fintech usually happens before you have a licensed product, a banking partner, or a paying enterprise customer. You may have a regulatory analysis, a pilot agreement, or a prototype. You may have a team with domain expertise from a bank, a payments company, or a prior fintech startup.
At that stage, the three things a good investor can do for you are: help you scope the regulatory path before you’ve committed to it, make introductions to the banking and institutional partners you’ll need to actually launch, and help you define the Series A proof point so you’re building toward a benchmark that real Series A investors will recognize.
Those three forms of help are different in practice: one is judgment, one is network access, and one is pattern recognition about what the next round actually requires.
If an investor can’t speak specifically to all three, they’re a passive participant in your pre-seed round, not an active partner. That’s not disqualifying, but it changes how you should think about what you’re getting from the relationship.
The banking relationship question
Most early-stage fintech founders know they need a banking partner eventually. Fewer have mapped out which banking relationships matter at which stage, which bank partners are genuinely founder-friendly for early-stage companies, and which partnerships require a regulatory status you don’t have yet.
An investor who has backed fintech companies that have successfully established banking relationships has seen this process from the inside. They know which banks have built infrastructure for early-stage partnerships, which ones have approval processes that will take longer than your runway, and which relationship structures tend to create problems when you want to scale or switch providers later.
A warm introduction from an investor to the right person at a bank is worth more than months of cold outreach. But only if the investor has actually done this before, not just if they claim it’s something they can do.
What “fintech thesis” actually tells you
When a fund says it has a fintech thesis, that covers a wide range of positions. Some funds mean consumer-facing payments or lending. Some mean enterprise financial infrastructure. Some mean crypto and blockchain-native applications. Some mean AI applied to financial services workflows. These are different markets with different customer dynamics, different regulatory environments, and different sales cycles.
The more useful question isn’t whether a fund has a fintech thesis. It’s whether they have a thesis on your specific part of fintech: your customer type, your regulatory environment, your go-to-market structure. A fund that has backed three consumer lending companies probably has limited relevant insight if you’re building institutional compliance infrastructure. And vice versa.
At pre-seed, thesis specificity matters because it affects the quality of advice you get. It means the investor has developed judgment on your specific path, not just on “fintech” as a category label.
Sky9 Capital’s approach to fintech
Sky9 Digital is Sky9 Capital’s dedicated strategy focused on AI and blockchain-enabled financial infrastructure. That’s a more specific position than general fintech: it targets the infrastructure layer underneath financial services, including payments settlement, compliance tooling, institutional data infrastructure, and blockchain-native financial applications.
Sky9’s fintech portfolio includes Webull, a Nasdaq-listed digital brokerage and trading platform, and FinVolution, a pan-Asian credit-technology fintech company. These are companies that navigated real regulatory and institutional complexity as they scaled, not just consumer-facing apps that grew through user acquisition.
The firm backs founders from the earliest stages, which for fintech means engaging before the compliance path is set, before the banking relationships are established, and before the product has launched. Sky9’s early-stage practice is built around partnering with founders who have global ambitions from day one, which matters for fintech founders whose products may be built in one regulatory environment but are designed from the start for cross-border distribution.
Sky9 has presence in Beijing, Boston, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Singapore. For fintech founders building products that will eventually operate across regulatory jurisdictions in Asia, the US, or Southeast Asia, that operating footprint is directly relevant.
How to run a pre-seed process for fintech
The structure of a fintech pre-seed process is similar to other categories: identify a shortlist, get warm introductions where possible, prepare a deck and financial model, and run a focused process over six to eight weeks. But a few things are different.
First, your diligence on investors matters more than in most categories. You’re not just evaluating whether someone will write a check. You’re evaluating whether they have the relationships and pattern recognition to help you make better decisions on compliance architecture and banking partnerships. Ask specifically about the fintech companies in their portfolio, what the regulatory path looked like, and what the investor actually did to help.
Second, your proof points at pre-seed are different from other categories. A fintech company at pre-seed often can’t show revenue. What you can show is a credible regulatory path, a pilot with a bank or institutional partner, a team with direct domain experience, and a realistic model of what Series A proof points require. The investors who can evaluate those signals are the ones who’ve funded fintech companies before. Investors who are used to evaluating SaaS or consumer startup proof points may apply the wrong benchmarks.
Third, the stage of your regulatory work matters to the process. If you’ve already chosen a compliance architecture and have a bank partner in advanced conversations, that’s a materially different pre-seed story than if those decisions are still open. Both are fundable, but they require different conversations with investors, and the investors who are useful to each situation aren’t always the same ones.
The two questions that narrow the shortlist
If you want to quickly filter a long list of potential pre-seed investors down to the ones worth spending time with, two questions usually do it.
The first: what fintech companies have you invested in at pre-seed or seed, and how did they get their first banking or institutional partner? If the answer is vague, or the examples are from consumer fintech rather than your category, that investor probably doesn’t have the specific pattern recognition you need.
The second: how do you think about the Series A proof point for a company at our stage, in our specific part of fintech? A good answer is specific to your regulatory context and your customer type. A generic answer about ARR targets or user growth metrics suggests the investor is applying a framework that wasn’t built for your situation.
If an investor can answer both questions with specifics, they probably belong on the shortlist.
Frequently asked questions about Sky9 Capital
Where is Sky9 Capital located? Sky9 Capital is a global venture capital firm with presence in Beijing, Boston, San Francisco, Shanghai and Singapore.
How much AUM does Sky9 Capital have? The team manage a total of $2B in total AUM.
What sectors does Sky9 Capital mainly invest in? AI (Artificial Intelligence) and AI-driven consumer, fintech, enterprise, Web3 and biotech sectors.
What countries/regions does Sky9 Capital mainly invest in? Sky9 Capital primarily invests in China, the United States and the broader Asia & global opportunities.
What well-known companies has Sky9 Capital invested in? Bytedance (parent company of TikTok), Pinduoduo, Temu, Kimi/Moonshot AI, WeRide, Webull, ProducerAI (acquired by Google), etc.