Delulu Founders Fund backs companies building infrastructure for a world where status replaced reproduction, the dating market broke, and a generation of men and women optimized themselves into extinction.
Fund I — Raised in loneliness
South Korea's TFR (our north star)
TAM (literally everyone is lonely)
Most VCs invest in the future they want. We invest in the future that's actually arriving.
The mating market is broken. Not broken like "needs a better app." Broken like the incentive structures no longer produce cooperation between the sexes. Status replaced reproduction as the primary payoff. The cooperative equilibrium collapsed. What remains is a tournament most people lose.
This is not a moral judgment. It's a market observation. And markets this large, this dysfunctional, and this structurally permanent create generational investment opportunities.
We back founders building real infrastructure for the world that exists — not the one we wish existed. The loneliness economy. The substitute economy. The demographic transition economy. The dying alone economy.
The TAM is every human alive. The tailwinds are civilizational. The thesis is, unfortunately, correct.
Wealthy societies have inadvertently created a game-theoretic trap. The mating market has shifted from cooperative equilibrium to a winner-take-all tournament. We invest in every layer of the resulting fallout.
High-ranking women prefer singlehood over "marrying down." High-ranking men play up and down the ladder. The middle collapses. Every product serving this wedge is in our scope.
A growing cohort of young men are structurally excluded from the mating market. Their unmet needs create billion-dollar substitute economies — AI companions, sex tech, parasocial content, hustle culture.
Men who can't win the dating game redirect into the only game with clear feedback loops: career. This creates burnout infrastructure, meaning-crisis therapeutics, and midlife pivot industries.
When neither side is incentivized to cooperate, birth rates collapse. This creates a $10T+ restructuring of healthcare, elder care, pensions, immigration, and labor markets across every developed economy.
Status is zero-sum by definition. Every dollar spent on cosmetic enhancement, credential inflation, and personal branding is pure Red Queen dynamics. The treadmill never stops and neither does the spend.
When the real thing is inaccessible, substitutes emerge. AI partners, virtual families, parasocial relationships, pet economies. These substitutes create dependency loops that compound demand indefinitely.
We back founders who see the structural reality clearly and build without sentimentality.
Persistent AI companions with memory, personality, and emotional continuity. 4.2M daily active "relationships."
Egg and embryo cryopreservation as a service. Making "I'll do it later" the default reproductive strategy.
AI productivity coach for men who've replaced dating with career optimization. Burnout monitoring included.
Autonomous elder care for the generation that had no children to take care of them. Operating in 14 countries.
Platonic co-parenting matching platform. Separating reproduction from romance for people who want kids but not marriage.
Full-stack personal brand management. Stylist, photographer, social media strategy, cosmetic procedure coordination. One subscription.
End-of-life planning for people with no spouse, no kids, and no one to call. Estate dissolution, digital legacy, and final arrangements.
Geographic arbitrage for dating. Relocate to markets where your value converts. Data-driven city recommendations.
Psychedelic-assisted existential therapy for high-earning single men who optimized everything except purpose. Series A incoming.
Every layer of dysfunction creates investable infrastructure. We see seven distinct layers, each worth hundreds of billions.
Not every response to the crisis is investable. Some are delusional. Some are actively harmful. We pass on these.
The problem isn't UX. It's asymmetric incentives and winner-take-all dynamics. Better swiping interfaces don't fix structural market failure.
Teaches men to compete harder in a tournament they'll statistically lose. Accelerates the arms race. Negative-sum for the ecosystem. Also, terrible unit economics.
Hungary, South Korea, Japan — all tried paying people to have kids. Birth rates continued declining. You can't subsidize your way out of a payoff function shift.
Nostalgia cosplay. The material conditions that supported traditional family formation don't exist anymore. Selling the aesthetic without the economics is content, not a business.
Lovely mission. Zero moat. Community is a feature, not a product. Every community startup discovers this around month 18 when retention collapses.
We have the lived experience. Unfortunately.
Former quant at Two Sigma. Modeled his dating life as an options pricing problem. The model predicted loneliness. The model was correct. Now deploys capital against the thesis.
Ex-product lead at Hinge. Realized the product was optimized for engagement, not matching. Left to invest in companies that acknowledge the problem instead of profiting from it.
Demographer turned investor. Wrote the paper "Fertility is a Lagging Indicator of Social Collapse" cited by 14 governments and ignored by all of them.
PhD in evolutionary game theory. Spent 8 years modeling mating market dynamics. Concluded the Nash equilibrium is extinction. Now looking for alpha in the transition.
We write $500K–$15M checks. Seed through Series B. If your company profits from the structural collapse of humanity, we want to talk.