How Leeor Mushin Built Formation to Back Frontier Enterprise Founders

Some of the most consequential early checks in venture history were written by people who spent years watching from inside a firm before starting their own. Leeor Mushin's path to co-founding Formation runs through exactly that kind of apprenticeship, and today's filing shows the fund he built putting fresh capital to work.

Formation Lights I, L.P. filed with $7.34 million raised, placing it among today's four venture-labeled vehicles with both a disclosed dollar amount and a clear public track record worth examining. Formation was co-founded by Leeor Mushin and Solly Garber, with offices spanning New York, San Francisco, and Miami. Before starting Formation, Mushin was a principal at Floodgate, where he was part of a team that made early investments in Twitter, Lyft, Okta, and Twitch, four companies that between them helped define what an early-stage venture outcome could look like over the following decade. He also created the 20|20 Fund while at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, a student-run vehicle investing in classmates' companies that gave him an early rep for backing founders before they had much beyond conviction and a plan.

What "Frontier Enterprise" Actually Means

Formation's stated focus is early-stage investing in founders building what the firm calls the "Frontier Enterprise," infrastructure and software aimed at exited founders and teams building tools that materially improve how other companies work. The firm typically writes checks between $250,000 and $2 million at the pre-seed and seed stages, a range consistent with a fund built to lead or meaningfully anchor a round rather than fill out a larger syndicate. Mushin has described the firm's approach as prioritizing long-term partnership with founders over transactional deal-by-deal relationships, a positioning increasingly common among newer funds trying to differentiate themselves in a crowded seed market where capital alone is no longer a scarce resource.

Why Formation Specifically Targets Repeat Founders

The emphasis on "exited founders" as a specific target profile is worth noting on its own. Backing repeat founders who have already been through a full company lifecycle, including a prior exit, is a deliberate strategy that trades away some of the upside of discovering a completely unproven first-time founder in exchange for a meaningfully lower base rate of founder-market mismatch and execution risk. It is a pattern-matching approach that has worked well for funds like Floodgate historically, and it appears Mushin has carried a version of that same instinct into Formation's own sourcing strategy. A fund built around repeat founders also tends to lean more heavily on its own network of prior portfolio companies and personal relationships from a partner's earlier fund than on cold inbound deal flow, a sourcing model that scales less predictably but tends to produce a higher hit rate per check written.

Why the Vehicle Is Named "Formation Lights"

Naming the vehicle "Formation Lights" also fits a naming convention some younger funds have adopted for early or opportunistic vehicles sitting alongside a firm's flagship fund, often used to move quickly on a specific deal or cohort of deals without reopening a full flagship raise. A fund willing to stand up a smaller, purpose-built vehicle like this one signals both discipline about not over-committing flagship capital to any single opportunity and confidence that the underlying deal flow justifies a dedicated pool, two things that matter to LPs evaluating whether a young manager's process is repeatable or opportunistic. Enterprise infrastructure as a category has also held up better than consumer-facing software through recent funding cycles, in part because the AI infrastructure buildout has created genuine new categories of tooling that did not exist even three years ago.

What This Means for Founders

For founders building enterprise infrastructure and evaluating pre-seed investors, a fund's willingness to lead a small round, rather than simply filling in behind a larger anchor investor, often matters more at this stage than absolute check size. A $7.34 million fund writing $250,000 to $2 million checks can lead several rounds a year while still reserving meaningful capital for follow-on participation in its winners. Teams still working out their cap table structure ahead of a first institutional check may also want to understand how a SAFE with a valuation cap compares to a priced seed roundbefore choosing which instrument to raise on, and how much dilution either path is likely to carry into a future Series A.

Browse the enterprise software investor directory and the SaaS-specific directory for teams building more horizontal tooling, or explore active capital on AngelLinx @ angellinx.ai/register.

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