About Us


DC Ventures –  Washington D.C. | Dublin | Buenos Aires

We are an early-stage focused Venture Capital and Startup advisory firm. We support and invest in entrepreneurs with the passion, drive and focus needed for success.

DC Ventures assists startups in areas crucial to funding and growth. Our team is made of industry experts and savvy investors who help entrepreneurs reach their goals. We are based in Washington D.C., Dublin and Buenos Aires.

Contact Us Now – Tell us about your startup!

What We Offer

We offer a combination of capital, mentorship and advisory services. This also comes with a network of industry experts that will assist entrepreneurs and founders in conceptualizing, building and growing their businesses. DC Ventures is not just an investor, we are partners to our start-ups. We were and still are entrepreneurs ourselves. We invest in people.

Support | Anchor | Growth | Fund 

Support

We provide support through advice and mentorship in key functional areas of a business to help it through the startup process and position it for funding.

Anchor

We generally like to be the anchor investor or first institutional investor. We understand the key dynamics of how the relationship between investors and entrepreneurs work.

Growth

We help startups gain and sustain proof of concept, traction and growth.

Fund

Our startups are prepared and assisted in moving towards their next stage of growth and funding.

Our Awesome Team

We believe in combining a great mix of professionals to promote creativity that brings ideas and solutions to the table.

Kyran Culhane

Kyran Culhane

Co-Founder & CIO View Details
Emily Hersh

Emily Hersh

Co-Founder View Details
Jonathan Rivas

Jonathan Rivas

Co-Founder View Details
Kyran Culhane

Kyran Culhane

Co-Founder & CIO

Kyran is one of the founding partners of DC Ventures. He additionally acts as Managing Partner & CIO of DCDB Group a global financial consulting firm. Kyran has notable experience in both consulting and finance throughout his career in the US, Latin America and Europe.

He is very enthusiastic about entrepreneurship and startup investment. He currently acts as an investor and mentor through DC Ventures to startups from North, Central and South America as well as Europe.

Born and Educated in Dublin, Ireland. Kyran is bilingual in English and Spanish.

A keen football fan but won’t reveal his team.

Emily Hersh

Emily Hersh

Co-Founder

Emily is a founder of DC Ventures. Emily serves as Managing Partner and COO of DCDB Group. She holds a dual Bachelor’s degree in Economics and International Political economy from Tulane University and a Master’s degree in International Economics from American University.

She has worked as a project consultant and research associate for Exoventure Associates and Native American Capital. In this capacity, Emily structured public/private joint ventures that incorporated New Market Tax Credits (NMTC) and Tribal Economic Development Bonds (TEDBS) into private project financing structures.

Emily is fluent in English and Spanish, and excels in both team leadership and in the ability to dissect and present complex projects in a concise and clear manner.

Jonathan Rivas

Jonathan Rivas

Co-Founder

Jonathan is a founder of DC Ventures. Originally from Washington, D.C., Jonathan Rivas acts as Managing Partner of DCDB Group. Jonathan brings over seven years of global financial experience to DCDB. He has held important positions at prestigious financial firms including Wells Fargo, BlackRock and served as Director of the WorkPlace Banking Division for PNC Financial Services Group in Washington, D.C. Jonathan is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and has a proficient level in Japanese.

Along with all his financial experience, Jonathan brings his extensive knowledge of linking and globalizing businesses in USA, Europe and Latin America for the purposes of finance, investments, banking and new ventures.

Jonathan is a supporter of DC United, Liverpool FC and FC Barcelona, He enjoys reading and traveling around the world. Jonathan resides between Washington, DC and Buenos Aires with his pug Mafalda.

Some Facts About Us Since 2012

We are driven by success. Every day we work hard to ensure that our startups are one step closer to reaching their full potential.

11

Investments

589578

Miles Travelled

26

People in Our Team

23

Investors

We Invest In

We invest in people, as without the founder(s), the business will never succeed. We invest not only capital but also our time into helping entrepreneurs make their startups successful. We are happy to review business ideas from around the world and across multiple sectors. We invest at the pre-seed stage, where our investments range between US $10,000 - $100,000. We are not limited by an industry-specific or regional mandates, but some of the main sectors we have invested in are as follows;

Fintech

E-Commerce

Online Media

Experience Economy

Social Media

Internet Of Things

 

Investments

We are proud of our portfolio of investments and are happy to be judged by the projects and entrepreneurs we have backed and continue to work with. We have led a number of pre-seed and early stage investments. Meet some of our startups.

13 Fronteras

Previous Investments

Rouge Reel
Puerto Finanzas
The Bubble
WAMBLOC
EMIA

Connect With Us

If you are a budding entrepreneur or start-up looking for funding, advice,

mentorship or just want to pick our brain go ahead and reach out to us HERE



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Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t. 

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Community

We believe in utilizing our network so as our startups have the best chance of success. With this in mind we carry out workshops and events to promote networking, idea sharing, mentorship and funding.
We also have a number of key industry partners.


Pre-seed and seed level VC firms | Angel Investors | Incubators |Accelerators

Pre-seed and seed level VC firms

We have partnered with other firms at pre-seed and seed level to optimize both funding levels and resources.

Angel Investors

Our network has been built into a solid global network of Angels who are always interested in new opportunities.

Incubators

Aside from our own program, we work closely with a tight nit global community of incubators.

Accelerators

We are partners with a number of global accelerator programs.

DC Ventures’ resources become our startup’s resources