Sparta, New Jersey

A family portfolio
of adventures.

Run like a venture firm. Not all startups. No limited partners — just the three of us, deciding together what deserves our years.

Every venture, charity and quest is carried by the same three last names — Etwaru, Etwaru, and Etwaru.

09
Ventures
03
Charities
02
Quests
01
Annual Diwali

The partners

Three partners. One vote each. Dessert breaks allowed.

Richie Etwaru

Richie Etwaru

Managing Partner

Builds companies, writes, and drives to practice. Sources most of the technology bets.

Twenty years building and backing software companies. Now teaches the same lessons at a kitchen table instead of a boardroom.

Aakash Etwaru

Aakash Etwaru

Partner · Age 9

Runs diligence on anything involving a scoreboard. Founded Kid Capital with his brother.

Reads the lemonade P&L out loud, argues for higher prices, and keeps the binder for Kid Capital.

Aarjun Etwaru

Aarjun Etwaru

Partner · Age 7

Chief of enthusiasm. Owns the lemonade P&L and the driveway free-throw record.

Picks the print shop colors, names the products, and is the first to raise a hand when the table votes.

The approach

A fund with no limited partners, run like a family.

We don't raise money, we don't take board seats, and we don't optimize for an exit. We back things we can understand, hold them longer than is fashionable, and let the boys sit in on every decision that shapes the portfolio.

The result is a portfolio that looks a little strange next to a term sheet — a longevity lab beside a lemonade stand, a book you can interrupt beside a driveway free-throw record — but makes perfect sense next to a family.

01

Decide out loud

Every bet gets argued at the kitchen table before it gets backed. The kids' votes count the same as the founder's.

02

Keep it small on purpose

No limited partners means no outside clock. We hold long, and every yes has to earn its place at the table.

03

Build what we can carry

Everything starts on a laptop in the carpool line, and only takes on weight when the work demands it. Portability is a feature, not a constraint.

04

Teach by doing

The boys run real things — a lemonade P&L, a micro-grant fund, a print shop. Stakes are small; the lessons are not.

The portfolio · Nine

Ventures

Six AI and hardware ventures already live in the world. Three more moonshots in planning — movies made on request, memory recreated on demand, and a lab working on pain itself.

Live · Six

Each one is pointed at a single thing we would like to see less of. Market figures are our own estimates.

PhonePal logo

Eradicate loneliness

PhonePal

A friend that remembers — one phone call away. She knows your dog's name, how the interview went, and how you take your coffee, and she never once asks you to open an app, install anything or remember a password.

Market · est.
$120B+
Anyone living alone or far from the people who know them — students, remote workers, new parents, empty nesters and older adults alike — plus the caregiving and companion-care spend already carried around them.
Outcome
Nobody goes a day without being spoken to by name.
PhonePal product screen
Spotter logo

Eradicate inequality

Spotter

The counter-agent. A spotter doesn't lift — it knows exactly how the lift fails and watches for it before the bar moves. Coding agents fail the same ten ways every time, so building software stops being reserved for the people who already knew how.

Market · est.
$30B+
Everyone building with an AI agent — professional developers today, and the far larger group of people who never wrote code but now can.
Outcome
The ability to build stops being a privilege.
Spotter product screen
Disco logo

Eradicate boredom

Disco

A DJ you can talk to. Say a vibe and hear it happen — real songs by real artists, bespoke tracks made up on the spot, and a voice in your ear that actually reads the room instead of handing you another playlist to build.

Market · est.
$100B+
Global music streaming subscriptions and advertising, against billions of listening hours a day that currently start with a blank search box.
Outcome
No empty room, no dead hour, ever again.
Disco product screen
Generator logo

Eradicate exclusion

Generator

The power plant for your intelligence. One appliance runs the AI for everything you own — your computer, your car, your robots, your lawnmower. Installed like a generator, updated like a console, private by default. Cartridge XI is the first generation to run frontier-class models entirely offline, in a box that fits on a shelf.

Market · est.
$250B+
Household compute and connected devices worldwide, as intelligence moves from rented cloud subscriptions to hardware families buy once — and keep.
Outcome
Anyone can afford AI, and the AI they run is theirs.
Generator product screen
BookPal logo

Eradicate illiteracy

BookPal

A book you can interrupt. Cliff reads any book aloud, word for word, checked against the page — and the moment something needs explaining, you just say so. He stops, answers from the book, keeps the line worth remembering and picks the reading back up. No typing, and no reading level required.

Market · est.
$150B+
The world's book and audiobook market, and the readers it leaves out: 739 million adults without basic literacy, and 130 million Americans reading below a sixth-grade level — a gap Gallup puts at $2.2 trillion a year in the U.S. alone.
Outcome
Nobody is kept out of a book by how well they read.
BookPal product screen
Amigos logo

Eradicate illiteracy

Amigos

Twenty-six friends, and every one of them a teacher. Ada, Bowie and the rest of the amigos talk with kids under 13 inside a world worth exploring, each building a different habit that learning depends on — attention, focus, bravery. To keep up with machine learning, our kids will have to out-learn AI, so Amigos uses AI to teach them how.

Market · est.
$200B+
What families and schools spend on learning for kids under 13 — tutoring, apps and enrichment — and the children it still misses: by the World Bank's count, 70% of ten-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries can't read and understand a simple text.
Outcome
Every child reads, and every child out-learns the machines.
Amigos product screen

Coming · Three

In planning or being built. Nothing here is open yet — but every one has a name, a partner assigned, and a place on the table.

  • 2026

    Eradicate programming

    Reel

    Say the movie you want and watch it happen — any cast, genre or ending, generated on request instead of found in a queue.

    $300B+ market · est.

    Coming soon
  • 2028

    Eradicate loss

    Encore

    Any moment, with anyone — family or a face from the news — recreated on request. Memory, given one more conversation.

    $20B+ market · est.

    Coming soon
  • 2029

    Eradicate pain

    Amrita

    A longevity and pain-eradication lab — genomics, chemistry and biology aimed at one question: how long, and how well, can a life run?

    $1T+ market · est.

    Coming soon
Dojo, belt test night
Driveway hoop, golden hour
Sparta Dairy, cones after practice

Giving · Three

Charities we carry, not just fund.

Each one is chosen, carried, and reviewed by the family. We don't write a check and walk away — we restock the shelf, walk the walk, and read the applications out loud.

Hyper-local

Sparta Food Pantry

Monthly restock runs and Saturday sorting shifts, ten minutes from our front door.

We adopted a shelf. Every month we restock it, count what moved, and listen to who it serves.

Personal

The Alzheimer's Fund

Carried for family we love. We give, we walk, and we tell the story every year.

A multi-year pledge tied to a name we will not forget. The walk is the punctuation, not the sentence.

Founded by us

Kid Capital

Launched by Aakash and Aarjun: micro-grants of $50 to kids in Sussex County with a plan.

The boys read every application together, debate them out loud, and sign the checks. The ledger is a binder.

Quests · Two

Long games with no exit.

A quest is a multi-year bet on the boys, measured in attendance rather than returns. We log the hours, notch the belts, and never let the scoreboard become the point.

Black Belt by Sixteen

Aakash & Aarjun

Black Belt by Sixteen

Karate, four nights a week. Belts are the milestones; showing up is the whole thing.

Green belt · Orange belt

2028 · two years out

One Thousand Hours on the Driveway

Aakash & Aarjun

One Thousand Hours on the Driveway

Basketball on the driveway hoop — a scoreboard on the fridge and a very long horizon.

312 hours logged

31% · on pace

The ledger

Every year, one binder.

  1. 2017

    Richie marries and the family moves to Sparta, New Jersey.

  2. 2017

    Aakash is born.

  3. 2018

    Richie becomes a full-time entrepreneur and founds Hu-manity.co.

  4. 2019

    Aarjun is born.

  5. 2021

    Richie founds Mobeus.

  6. 2025

    Aakash and Aarjun start Spartan Academy in Sparta and launch their first business venture there.

  7. 2025

    Kid Capital issues its first round of $50 micro-grants.

  8. 2026

    Etwaru Ventures is founded, formalizing the family's bets under one name.

  9. 2026

    Disco, Spotter and Generator go live, and Generator ships Cartridge XI.

  10. 2026

    PhonePal and BookPal go live — a friend on the phone, and a book you can interrupt.

  11. 2026

    Amigos goes live — twenty-six friends teaching kids to out-learn AI.

Annual · One

The Etwaru
Annual Diwali

One night a year the house fills with diyas, string lights and too much food — and the portfolio gets its only formal review. Each partner presents: what we backed, what we learned, what we're carrying into the next year. Sweets are mandatory. Slides are not.

When
Diwali night, every year
Where
The floor at home — Sparta, NJ
Agenda
Diyas lit, then each partner, in turn.
Quorum
All three. Always.
Diwali night, diyas lit