Tahira Dosani | Resilience VC

Venture Wishlist shares ideas and themes VCs want to fund. Brought to you by Purpose Built venture studio.

Tahira Dosani is co-founder and managing partner of ResilienceVC, a Washington D.C.–based seed-stage venture firm investing in embedded-fintech startups that build financial resilience for U.S. consumers and small businesses. ResilienceVC closed its debut fund in November 2024 with $58 million in AUM and invests in seed rounds with first checks of roughly $1 million, usually taking a board seat to help founders reach repeatable, scalable product-market fit.

Tahira’s venture wishlist

🌐 Tech-enabled access to government benefits – Platforms that help people discover, verify eligibility for, and seamlessly claim public benefits.

☂️ Next-gen insurance & claims automation – Software underwrites new or rising risks (e.g., climate-driven blackouts for restaurants, gap-coverage for high deductibles) and use AI-first claims processing to slash payout times.

🏭 Embedded fintech for SMBs – Vertical SaaS marketplaces that digitize opaque, offline processes (like food contract manufacturing) and embed working-capital or purchase-order financing at the point of transaction.

🌾 Financial tools for overlooked segments – Products designed for rural households, gig workers and 1099 earners that lack employer-provided benefits (e.g. portable retirement solutions, income smoothing and affordable credit).

👵 Retirement resilience – Modern, low-fee, portable alternatives to 401(k)s that convert savings into guaranteed lifetime income and protect older Americans from fraud and volatility.

Other insights

💡 Problem-first, tech-second – Focus on founders with deep understanding of customer pain.

💰 Profit and impact can coexist – It is possible to build highly profitable businesses that serve low- and moderate-income consumers ethically; tech bends the cost curve to make smaller ticket sizes viable.

🏗️ Embedded distribution is a moat – Partner channels (employers, vertical SaaS, merchant platforms) offer low-CAC access, proprietary data for better underwriting, delivery at the exact moment of need, and borrowed trust with hard-to-reach users.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Founder > model – At seed, ResilienceVC underwrites the founder’s ability to navigate pivots and regulatory shifts over a 5- to 10-year journey—the average VC-founder relationship now outlasts the average U.S. marriage.

📈 Crowded top, vast middle – While many startups chase affluent urban customers (and battle soaring CAC), the real white-space lies in huge, underserved markets (e.g.lower middle income consumers, rural businesses and aging Americans).

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Full Interview

An easy place to start is an overview of your fund and your strategy.

Resilience VC is a seed-stage fund. We focus on early-stage startups in the fintech space, specifically startups leveraging fintech to build financial resilience for American consumers and small businesses. When we think about the financial state of most American consumers and small businesses, it's pretty dire. Seventy percent of Americans are not financially healthy. They aren't able to manage their day-to-day finances, weather inevitable shocks and risks, or save for the future. We focus on models that build financial resilience—helping people increase earnings, reduce expenses, mitigate risks, and build assets. In doing so, we can create a population that is more financially stable, secure, and resilient. That's the focus of the fund.

And when do you get involved in companies? What's the typical check size?

We invest at the seed stage, and these terms mean different things to different people. For us, seed means the company has a product live in market and some early customer and revenue traction. We don't invest pre-product or pre-revenue. We want to see some proof of concept—evidence that customers are willing and able to pay for the product and data on initial customer usage. We come in with an equity check, typically in the million-dollar range, and work with these companies. We often take a board seat and work closely with founders below the board level on operations to help them reach product-market fit and develop a scalable, repeatable model. With future rounds of capital, they can then accelerate growth and impact.

When you're thinking about investing in a company, what are the mental models or concept patterns you find yourself relying on?

I don't know that I necessarily have a go-to mental model per se, but there are a few things that are central to the way I approach investing. One is that I really want a product and a business built around a deep understanding of the customer and the customer's needs. So often, especially in the tech world, you see products that are a technology solution looking for a problem—especially with new technologies. GenAI today, crypto and blockchain a few years ago—you see people saying, "We want to leverage this technology for the sake of the technology," not, "We want to leverage this technology because it's the single best way to solve this customer pain." And I think the latter is what's really critical.

Any business model that’s going to be successful has to be built on a true understanding of customer needs and really be solving a pain point. People are not typically willing to pay for something that isn't a real issue. It has to be solving a need that’s not being met today, or, if it is being met, it has to be significantly better than the status quo. Because there are always switching costs—people tend to stay where they are unless they have a real reason to move. So I think that’s really critical.

I also think—and this is part of the rationale for the fund strategy itself—we have to focus on large markets. We see a lot of companies continuing to fight for the top of the market, for middle- and high-income consumers, and it's incredibly competitive and crowded there. Customer acquisition costs are skyrocketing in those segments. Meanwhile, the majority of the population isn’t being effectively served. For the companies that figure out how to build relevant, quality, affordable products for those segments, they’ll be first movers in a massive market, with huge room for growth and returns.

So, with a deep understanding of customer needs and a focus on large market opportunities, I really see the low- and moderate-income segment, and the small business segment in the U.S., as large, deeply underserved markets.

The third thing I’ll mention in terms of my approach to investing is a real focus on the founder. We come in early. We know the business model will evolve, the revenue model will likely evolve. We're taking a bet on a founder or founding team to navigate that evolution, go through pivots, and respond to a changing and volatile market, new regulation—all of that. So it's about finding a founder I want to work with for the next five to ten years. The average founder-funder relationship in the U.S. lasts longer than the average marriage today. These are long-term relationships, and we want to approach them as such.

So, for me, taking time to get to know a founder, understand their motivations, their experience, their trajectory, and what they want out of this is really critical.

So you mentioned customer pain, large market, and team. Those are certainly important. I would say that other investors probably share most of that. Do you have any non-consensus beliefs that you think inform your investing differently than others?

Yeah, and part of this is linked to the market opportunity I was talking about. But really, first and foremost, it's that businesses can make real profits while ethically and responsibly serving lower-income customers. Historically, lower-income customers have not been served because it wasn't particularly profitable. So they were either not served at all or served with really predatory and extractive models. I very much believe—and hopefully, this is becoming more of a consensus viewpoint—but I think there's still a lot of people who think that profits and serving underserved segments are mutually exclusive. There is huge opportunity to reach lower-income segments of the market. It looks different, and you have to design differently for them. They are going to have lower balances, smaller transaction sizes, their behaviors are going to be different. You may need to invest more in certain elements of the customer journey—into onboarding, into customer support—because they're new to these products. But it doesn't mean you can't profitably serve them. That's where I think technology plays a really important role. Technology can fundamentally transform the cost curve, make it profitable to serve these segments. We're really excited to meet the founders that see that opportunity.

I think I'm understanding you. You're saying that technology offers lower transaction costs, lower cost of service. Therefore, you can support a customer who may not have as much to spend or as many assets or transactions.

Exactly.

Any investments or examples you want to share that you've been excited about recently?

I'll go into a couple of examples, but before that, I want to make one more comment. Certainly, technology can make it cheaper and more profitable to serve these customers, but it's still hard. That’s one reason we at Resilience focus on embedded fintech. Going direct to consumer and paying a lot to acquire customers unfamiliar with your product or category is challenging. Embedding your offering in other products, services, channels, or value chains where those customers are already engaging or transacting creates huge advantages—from a distribution perspective, a data perspective, a delivery perspective, and a trust perspective.

On the distribution side, you often have access to a captive customer base that you can tap into at zero or very low incremental acquisition costs. On the data side, when you're embedded, you can often access data—often proprietary data—on those customers, which lets you better target products, better underwrite, and reduce risk. The delivery advantage means you can deliver those financial products seamlessly at the right moment in the user journey, which creates a better user experience and typically leads to higher usage, loyalty, and retention. Those factors drive profitability in significant ways.

Finally, there's the trust advantage. When it comes to serving people with financial tools, trust is critical. By working through embedded channels—through partners, whether employers or other core products and services these customers need—it can be easier to build trust. That’s another element that can make the mass market, particularly the lower end, profitable and serviceable in ways it historically may not have been.

Let me share a couple of examples from our portfolio that exemplify this—one on the consumer side and one on the small business side. On the small business side, one of the first investments we made from the fund was into a company called PartnerSlate. They focus on small businesses in the food and beverage space—small food and beverage manufacturers. About 30,000 new food products come to market each year in the U.S., and the majority are brought to market by small businesses. When these businesses start to grow—they might be producing at home or in a local commercial or test kitchen—they get their first grocery store contract and have to ramp up production significantly. They aren’t going to build a manufacturing line in their house; they typically find a contract manufacturer to meet the demand.

And historically, finding a contract manufacturer has taken a small food and beverage brand about twelve months. It's a pretty analog process. Most of these contract manufacturers don't have much of a digital presence, so they are cold calling or cold emailing hundreds of manufacturers to try and find who has the right capabilities and capacity to run a production line for them. Often in that time, they may lose a purchase order they had or just be stuck for months.

So PartnerSlate built a platform to help match small food and beverage brands with contract manufacturers. They can help those products get to market much faster as a result. Even once a small food brand finds their contract manufacturing partner, they still have a real challenge. They have to pay upfront for the ingredients and manufacturing, but typically don't get paid until 30 to 60 days after they deliver product to the grocery retailer.

So there's this two to three month working capital gap they face. PartnerSlate not only does the matching, but has embedded a working capital product into their platform to help address this need. They can offer purchase order financing at attractive terms to these small businesses, not only enabling them to better connect into the supply chain, but also providing that critical financing.

One of the founders has been deep in the contract manufacturing world for a long time. His wife worked at a small food brand that struggled to find contract manufacturers. He saw this pain point directly, went deep into that space, and built this business around a need he understood very well. They focus on serving this segment of businesses that struggle to scale otherwise and embedded a fintech product onto a platform that's not inherently a financial services platform, but can deliver that financing at the moment in the user journey when someone's found their contract manufacturer and is trying to figure out how to pay for ingredients and manufacturing upfront.

Rather than stopping the process and going elsewhere to find a third-party lender who doesn't understand their business, they can get a loan directly through the PartnerSlate platform—with someone who knows the business, knows they're ready to go into production, can match the credit disbursement with the timing of when that product is going into production, and carry much lower risk than a third-party lender would.

Very cool. Curious what themes you're most excited about when you look towards the future.

There's a lot that keeps me excited. I will say there are a number of areas where I see huge opportunity to solve a customer pain point or to innovate and create efficiencies in a market that isn't efficient today. As we talked about with PartnerSlate, the contract manufacturing world—finding a contract manufacturer is offline, inefficient. How do we digitize that? How do we bring efficiency to it? How do we layer in the financial product? I think that's the approach we take to a lot of spaces.

One we're looking at closely right now is government benefits. It's really challenging for most people to, one, find out about these benefits, two, understand whether they're eligible, and three, actually apply and get them. What are ways that technology can be leveraged to make that process more efficient at any or all of those stages: awareness, eligibility, and actual application?

I think that's a really interesting area. And you've seen nonprofits step into it. What do you think of the business models that make sense for that kind of startup?

Historically, it's been nonprofits, social workers, folks like that helping people connect to these benefits. But there's absolutely room for for-profit businesses in this space. Even in our portfolio, for example, Alice is a company that helps employees—hourly wage workers, typically—better access pre-tax benefits on a real-time and contribution-free basis. What they've done is found a party incentivized to help employees access these benefits: the employer.

If the employer knows their employee can get money back equivalent to an entire week of wages in a given year, that's meaningful. The employer is willing to pay a small amount to help their employees get access to those benefits. That's one example of a business model where the employer sees value. We see a lot of employers in industries with incredibly high turnover rates, where employees often miss work because they lack reliable transportation, affordable commuting options, or access to childcare that enables them to come to work.

The employer has a vested interest in solving these challenges because it means that employee will be more reliable. So they're willing to play a role in helping pay for those benefits. There's an opportunity to ask: who in the value chain has an interest and is willing to enable the end customer, who may not always be able to pay for this product themselves? The embedded approach allows us to say: who else in their value chain might be? In this case, the employer. That's one example of a for-profit business model there.

You see plenty of deals. Are there any startups you wish existed that you could invest in?

I would say there's a lot I wish I could see in a number of spaces, and I'll point to a few. I think the insurance world broadly has a lot of room for innovation, and there are many risks people have that aren't effectively covered today. I'd love to see the rise of a new set of insurance products. There are companies starting to do this. I looked at a company recently called Sentinel that is looking at insurance related to newer challenges we're seeing. As climate change results in more extreme weather events, we’re seeing more things like power outages and blackouts.

Imagine a restaurant. If there's a blackout for a day or two, not only are they unable to open, which is a huge revenue loss, but if the power goes out, all the ingredients in their refrigerators get ruined. There's a real cost to these businesses if an event like that occurs. Historically, there hasn't been a way to insure against that risk. You could insure against flooding from a storm, but not against lost revenue or ingredients from a blackout. Yet events like this are on the rise.

Can we find a way to insure those types risks in a way that is easy to do? I think technology, especially advances in AI, can make insurance claims much easier and faster. Why should we have to send an appraiser to someone’s home to calculate the value manually of every damaged item if there's flooding, when we should be able to take a video around the room and have AI estimate the value of the items and damages? That could mean a claim gets processed significantly faster, someone gets their payout faster, and their home repaired faster. That’s a space that comes to mind right now where there’s huge room for innovation.

One of the things I wonder about the insurance space is whether the fragmentation, state-by-state regulation, is a barrier to innovation.

Certainly, that can be a challenge. I think we're not going to see a lot of new startup insurers because of the capital requirements to be a risk-bearing entity. But there is room for models working on the claims management piece we just talked about, the distribution acquisition piece, and the product piece—partnering with regulated insurers to have them underwrite those products. They can be an MGA, they can drive distribution. So I think there is plenty of room for startups to play in that world.

You mentioned insurance—other startups you wish existed?

That's one I've been thinking a lot about recently. I was reading an article last night on title insurance, for example, and how that's one of the insurance products with the lowest loss ratio.

Insurers get paid to insurance against something that almost never happens.

Exactly. It's an incredibly low probability. Yes, it's a high payout if it does occur, but the probabilities are so low that it's one of the most profitable products out there. Yet it's effectively cartel-controlled in terms of pricing. I think there's a lot of room in that space. There are so many insurance products—gap insurance, for example, is a really interesting space. Insurance that helps you pay for deductibles and copays so you're not out of pocket. It's something I've been thinking about in the last 24 hours, so that's where my mind is at the moment.

Title insurance is one that has been personally very frustrating because it feels like something that fundamentally is an information product. We've got information on paper somewhere in all of these government buildings not accessible.

This is also one of those things— in the US, we don't have a central federal repository of real estate ownership. We have state, often city or county-level records of transactions. So it's not to say someone owns this; it's to say the last recorded transaction on this home was purchased by this person. There's certainly room for innovation even with that infrastructure layer. If we could improve that, we could eliminate the need for products like title insurance.

Are there any other specific customer profiles or problems that you'd want founders to be thinking about? You talked about lower income—anything more specific?

Within the low and moderate income population, there are specific groups that remain particularly underserved. We see a lot of startups focusing on urban areas, but there are people living outside of urban areas—more rural customers, farmers in this country—who are underserved by financial tools. There aren't good products necessarily tailored to them.

Older Americans are also typically underserved by financial services. They're often targeted in more fraudulent ways and with scams. Ensuring someone is financially stable and resilient through retirement is a huge opportunity.

You were talking about other business models. 401(k)s were created to allow executives to get bigger bonuses on a tax-advantaged basis. They weren’t created as a retirement saving solution, though that’s how they're used now. But they are, in many ways, not optimal. They’re not portable, they don’t follow you from job to job, and they often have significant fees, which slows your capital growth. The responsibility still falls on the individual to figure out how much to invest. You don’t know when you’re going to retire or how long you’ll live. As we’ve moved away from pensions, we’ve lost the idea of guaranteed income through retirement. I’d love to see a set of products like that return, with better solutions for people managing their financial lives as they approach retirement.

On the flip side, younger people in this country don’t have great, non-predatory, entry-level financial tools and capability-building. With the rise of the 1099 economy and gig work in the U.S., gig workers are often not well served. Historically, we've relied on employers to provide key financial services—like health insurance and retirement savings—but people who don’t get those through an employer need other ways to access them. That’s just a sample, but there are many segments where there’s real opportunity.