Angel investor and donor strategy for UnaMentis
Two people with full-time jobs. Working software. A clear vision. An MIT-licensed open source voice AI education platform with a provider-agnostic architecture nobody else is building. A curriculum format (UMCF) that maps to every major education standard. Kyutai Pocket TTS running inference on-device. No time for months-long grant application cycles.
What you need: someone who understands what this is, sees where it's going, and writes a check. What you don't need: another form to fill out.
This is a plan to find individual people who have the personal authority and initiative to write a check when they encounter something they believe in. Angels, donors, individuals. No committee. No application. No prescribed deal structure.
An angel investor, by definition, acts on their own initiative. There are common patterns in how angels structure support, but there are no rules. An angel can write a personal check, make a donation, set up any arrangement that makes sense to both parties, or do something no one's done before.
Anti-investor. The red lines are specific: no board seats, no veto on licensing decisions, no veto on giving away commercial features or plugins. Those are governance boundaries that protect the mission. They are not a rejection of normal accountability. Basic reporting, regular updates, honest communication about progress and setbacks, and professional treatment of anyone who backs this project are not threats to founder control. They are baseline respect. The goal is mission-protective, not adversarial.
Any serious angel, even one deeply aligned with the mission, will ask how UnaMentis Learning creates durable value when the founders can give away any commercial feature. The pitch document addresses this directly: hosting, implementation services, enterprise workflow tooling, curriculum development, and managed deployments all generate real revenue without closing the open source core.
The right to give things away is not the same as giving everything away. In practice: an international school in a developing country has made incredible strides raising up the community around it, maybe providing outreach education to small villages and outlying regions. Giving them access to advanced commercial plugins and donating some professional services hours could make a transformative difference. These would almost always be organizations that could never afford the services in the first place. This does not conflict with revenue. It serves people who were never going to be paying customers.
The founders do not want to define limiting criteria around this in a way that could be used to second-guess specific decisions. The intention is clear: reasonable, respectable decisions about when giving something away creates genuine impact for organizations that genuinely need it. Maintaining full control on this point ensures those decisions can be made quickly and without friction. That is a feature of the model, not a flaw. But it is a question that should be anticipated, not avoided.
People who built open source companies, had exits or raised enough to have personal capital, and now write $5K-$50K checks into projects they believe in. They evaluate founder-market fit and technical credibility over traction metrics.
Drupal founder, Acquia co-founder. Belgian, 30+ angel investments. Has maintained the open source project alongside the commercial entity for over 20 years. Deeply understands the "never close the core" philosophy. The single most aligned target on this list. Reachable via his blog (dri.es), contact page, and Twitter (@Dries).
Cal.com co-founder, German, now US-based. 5+ angel investments including Retell AI (voice AI), Twenty, telli, and Formbricks. All open source. Reachable via X/Twitter (@peer_rich). Deeply understands the COSS model with German roots and American startup sensibility.
OSS Capital founder. Coined the term COSS (Commercial Open Source Software). Led 40+ founding seed rounds globally. His thesis: open source companies are "inherently philanthropic while simultaneously capitalistic." Listed here as an individual, not as a fund. Even if he passes personally, a conversation connects to 50+ COSS founders who are potential angels.
Snyk co-founder. Israeli-British, built an open source security company to unicorn status. 100+ investments, focuses on developer tools and open source. Reachable via Twitter (@guypod) and LinkedIn.
Yahoo founding team, CiviCRM co-founder. Open source nonprofit CRM used by 14,000+ organizations including Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons. Now runs Chintu Gudiya Foundation focused on education. The intersection of open source, education, and philanthropy.
Papermark founder. German, EU-based. Primary value as a connector: maintains a public list of open source investors. Also makes small early-stage COSS investments himself.
People who made money in education technology or adjacent fields and now invest in mission-driven education projects.
London. Runs Angel Investing School, member of Atomico Angel Programme, 15+ startup investments. Explicitly focused on first-time founders. Evaluates founder passion and domain expertise heavily. Likely more valuable as a connector into the UK angel/edtech ecosystem.
UK-based. Former Knewton adaptive learning team, Engineering Doctorate from Imperial College London. EdTech investor and advisor focused on the future of learning. Interested in personalized learning, which is UnaMentis's core value proposition.
The hardest to find systematically but often the most aligned. Someone with resources who encounters UnaMentis organically, whether through a blog post, a conference talk, a Hacker News thread, or a personal connection, and just gets it. You can't search a database for this person, but you can dramatically increase the odds of finding them through specific actions.
"I'm building UnaMentis, an MIT-licensed open source voice-first AI learning platform. Provider-agnostic (9 STT, 8 TTS, 5 LLM providers), runs on-device with Kyutai Pocket TTS, includes a curriculum format (UMCF) that maps to IEEE LOM, SCORM, and xAPI. Two-person team, working software, iOS app in beta. We're looking for someone who believes in what we're doing enough to help us get server hosting for our beta users and travel to present this to the right audiences. Happy to show you a live demo. unamentis.org"
A well-crafted Show HN post is the single highest-leverage thing you can do for visibility with zero cost and minimal time. Written by Richard. First person. Honest. Technical. HN rewards substance and punishes marketing.
NotebookLM approach: Upload architecture docs, the UMCF spec, about page, and pitch. Generate an Audio Overview for a podcast-style walkthrough you can share as a link.
Written version: A Substack/Medium Q&A addressing every hard question an angel would ask. Why voice? Why open source? Why MIT? How do you make money? What if someone forks you? What do you need the money for? Why trust a two-person team?
OpenVC (openvc.app) is a directory of individual investors. It is not a program, an application, or a process. Search, filter, message directly. Free. Filter by geography, check size, sector, and stage. Includes a fundraising CRM and pitch deck tracking. You could have a filtered list of 20-30 relevant angels within an hour and send personalized messages within a week.
FLOSS/fund (dir.floss.fund) is backed by Zerodha and distributes $1 million annually in grants of $10,000-$100,000 to FOSS projects. Create a funding.json manifest file in your GitHub repo and submit. No application form in the traditional sense. Submissions reviewed quarterly. The effort is minimal (30 minutes) and the potential upside is meaningful.
Open source operator world: Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Spencer Kimball (CockroachDB), Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub co-founder, OSS Capital LP, 175+ angel investments before formalizing PWV), Job van der Voort (Remote).
AI-engineer and developer community world: Shawn Wang (angel investor, deep in AI-engineer and developer-community networks). Not education-native, but closer to the AI-builder culture around voice, LLM products, and open technical communities than several names on the primary list. Publicly identifies as an angel investor.
Voice AI / edge computing world: Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO, early ElevenLabs seed angel) and Daniel Gross (early ElevenLabs seed angel). Both have validated conviction in voice AI and the liquidity to act quickly.
Every angel conversation, even one that ends in a pass, should end with "who else should I be talking to?"
Regular speaking at Portland AI community events (2-3 times monthly), mentoring on voice AI, FIRST Robotics team mentoring, civic leadership as Planning Commissioner, and a decade-plus at CD Baby/Downtown Music Holdings all create existing relationships. A warm intro from someone who has seen Richard present will outperform a cold DM every time. Before cold outreach to any target, consider whether anyone in the existing network has a connection.
The people who write these checks are people who have lived the open source journey themselves. They don't need to be convinced that open source education infrastructure matters. They already know. They don't need traction metrics. They need to believe in the founder and see working software.
Richard has 30+ years of technology credibility, five open source projects shipped in the last year, working iOS software, a thoughtful architecture, and a curriculum format that maps to every major standard. The pitch isn't "trust us, we'll figure it out." The pitch is "we've already figured it out, we just need resources to get it in front of people."
A note on comparables: the reference points for this conversation are stewardship-model projects like Moodle and Ghost, not VC-backed commercial open source companies like Cal.com or PostHog. Those are excellent companies, but they cue venture expectations around growth, capture, and exit that do not apply here. Moodle has operated as an open source learning platform with a commercial services layer for over 20 years. Ghost runs a sustainable nonprofit-owned publishing platform with paid hosting. Both demonstrate that mission-protective open source can create real, lasting value without venture dynamics. That is the story UnaMentis fits into.