Shane Sabine is Managing Partner of Punch Capital, where he backs first- and second-generation immigrant founders building B2B and AI companies in the U.S. The thesis, he says, comes directly from his own decade living abroad in Germany. Now, based in Majorca, he is looking for the best founders chasing the American Dream.
Punch Capital has co-invested alongside General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, and Khosla, with several portfolio companies going on to raise follow-on rounds led by Union Square Ventures and Insight Partners. Sabine also hosts Punchcast, a founder interview series that doubles as a deal-sourcing engine — several of his LP and founder relationships trace back to guests he interviewed first.
Fund I was small and personal: roughly $3 million from a single family office, raised without any real LP process. That, Sabine says, is exactly what’s changing with Fund II. He’s now targeting institutional capital — family offices, foundations, and eventually institutional LPs — and going through VC Lab’s accelerator to professionalize everything from the pitch deck to the fund’s legal structure.
The bigger shift is narrative. Punch Capital’s Fund II is being rebranded as the American Dream Fund, alongside a companion foundation focused on scholarships and research grants. Sabine is candid about the tension in that framing: “immigrant” and “international” carry different connotations depending on which LP is in the room, particularly with some European allocators. His answer has been to lean into the commercial story — America as the largest capital market in the world — while keeping the founder-facing sourcing angle rooted in the immigrant thesis itself.
That sourcing strategy is also getting more structured. Where Fund I ran on travel, warm intros, and Sabine’s own network, Fund II is built around concentrated deal flow from top U.S. university ecosystems — Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, MIT — through a small bench of venture partners, including one based near Sabine in Majorca, each allocated capital to deploy independently into founders from their own networks.
Underneath the branding conversation is a more fundamental question Sabine keeps returning to: as a solo GP without an institutional track record tied to his current base, how does he build the trust that gets an LP to say yes? His answer, repeated more than once in the conversation, is a line he picked up recently and has clearly internalized: money moves at the speed of trust.
Whether that trust translates into a closed Fund II remains to be seen — Sabine describes himself as still in the early, “feedback-seeking” stage of the raise. But the thesis itself is a bet on a well-documented pattern: immigrant founders are disproportionately represented among unicorn companies, and Sabine is wagering that being visibly, personally invested in that community — through the fund, the podcast, and now a foundation — is what will let him source the outliers before larger funds do.
