Non-Coastal Venture Capital Firm AZ-VC Adds Second Vintage Vehicle to its
Successful $115 First Fund
PHOENIX, Sept. 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — AZ-VC, a U.S. venture capital firm fueling innovation outside traditional coastal markets, today announced the launch of its second fund, AZ-VC II, managing an undisclosed amount in an effort to foster innovation and momentum outside of traditional U.S. tech hubs.
The firm began its franchise in 2022, anchored by Pinnacle West Corporation (PNW: NYSE), in addition to mostly Arizona-based limited partners, including Western Alliance Bancorp (NYSE: WAL), Trinity Capital (Nasdaq: TRIN), and Salt River Project. AZ-VC is led by Managing Partner, Jack Selby, an original employee and former executive at PayPal and currently a Managing Director at Thiel Capital (the family office of Peter Thiel).
The fund builds on the success of AZ-VC’s $115 million Fund I, which has invested in breakout regional startups like Etched, Bluetail, Nuclearn, Stax.ai, Velocity Engine, Soraban, Uplinq, Orama, Peerlogicand many others. The burgeoning portfolio reaffirms the surplus of non-coast talent seeking local financial capital sources.
Like its first vintage, AZ-VC Fund II will focus on exceptional entrepreneurs while maintaining a sector agnostic purview. The Series A investment thesis targets companies that are post-revenue with proven product-market-fit. The fund leverages Selby’s “PayPal Mafia” background and opens doors for portfolio companies in Silicon Valley and around the world.
Too many non-coast regions are stuck in a “funding” desert, which creates a series of negative feedback loops which reinforces this challenge. Non-coastal entrepreneurs often must travel to coastal VCs for initial funding, which adds unnecessary complexity that can be a factor in companies failing to secure funding and ultimately going out of business. For the start-ups that do raise money, many are beholden to their out-of-state financiers, sometimes moving offices – if not the entire company – in order to be near them. What is most problematic, when an investment proves successful the financial windfall usually recycles locally within the out-of-state ecosystem, reducing benefits to the non-coastal area where the entrepreneur and investment emanated.
“Coastal venture capital is broken; too much money is going into an increasingly concentrated geography and being invested in a finite subset of companies at astronomical valuations,” continues Selby. “It is problematic when a couple of AI companies raise the same amount of capital as the entire U.S. venture capital industry’s AUM in 2018. Despite the breathless storytelling around sectors like artificial intelligence, the end result is an inflated asset bubble that will make the 2000 ‘dot-com’ bubble seem pedestrian by comparison.”
