Cameron Borumand and Fuse are betting on the local tech scene

If there’s one place the Seattle-area startup ecosystem can improve, Cameron Borumand says, it’s acting a little less humble.

“People don’t like to beat on their chests and brag about themselves, which is great when you live here and you’re friends with people,” he says. “But when you’re building a software company, and you want it to be a world-beating company and you’re going up against five new startups trying to disrupt what you do every single year, sometimes telling a big, ambitious story that is so ambitious it can be a little shocking for some to hear is the right strategy.”

Borumand, general partner at the Bellevue-based venture capital firm Fuse, is trying to change that narrative and put more local startups on the map. The firm has made almost 20 investments over the past year and a half, including in Seattle-area companies like the voice technology startup WellSaid Labs and the agricultural robotics startup Carbon Robotics.

Fuse launched in 2020 with former Ignition partners Borumand and Kellan Carter as founding and general partners. The two already had a relationship with Brendan Wales, formerly a partner at E.ventures, who moved to the Seattle area just months after having a new baby. Wales became the third general partner at Fuse.

The Business Journal spoke with Borumand about Fuse’s work, the Seattle ecosystem and the firm’s star venture partner, Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner.

What was Fuse’s launch like? 

Feb. 24 (2020) was the exact date, and that was a couple of weeks before you started to hear things like, “Two weeks to stop the spread.” Two weeks to stop the spread has turned into two years. We were born in the pandemic, and it was fine. We were very lucky in the sense that the Seattle business community stepped up to back Fuse in a very meaningful way. Our first close of capital for Fund 1 came mostly from strategic business execs in the area who wanted to attach their names to Fuse.

You’ve invested in local companies like WellSaid, Pictory AI and Zuper. What is the most exciting trend in the startup scene?

You have the two biggest enterprise software companies in the world with Microsoft and Amazon based in Seattle, but you also have Google Cloud based here. So the internet plumbing and piping really flows through the Pacific Northwest. Combine that with the vertical industry leaders in advanced manufacturing with Boeing and Paccar, or real estate with Redfin and Zillow, or retail with Nike, Nordstrom, REI and others, it’s a very unique city that has a base of the big incumbents, and also now you’re starting to see the emerging (software-as-a-service) leaders step in.

And how is that impacting the region’s tech scene? 

It has created a very unique ecosystem for really three categories that we’re investing behind. Horizontal enterprise software, that really is the majority of what we do. Second is vertical software. These industries that have operated certain ways for decades, how will they become digitally transformed using software? Lastly, B2B marketplaces. We have one of the biggest marketplaces in the world in Amazon here, and the amount of marketplace talent spinning out of that business and others is quite remarkable.

What are you looking for when you invest in a startup? 

We put a lot of emphasis on the team. Digging down in there, it’s really two things. One is what is the founder's ability and relentlessness to obsess about the customer experience. We like investing in founders that are constantly thinking about their end customer experience and thinking about unique ways they can add value from a very early stage. ... Sometimes you have to do unscalable things early on to make sure your first set of core customers are happy and successful. The second thing we really look for in founding teams is the ability to hire, particularly senior leaders within the company. 

What is it like working with Bobby Wagner? 

He’s super humble, and he’s an absolute sponge. Everything that he hears from a founder, he remembers. It’s quite remarkable. He’ll come back and reference things from founder pitches that we have. It’s just incredible his ability to retain information and use that information to make decisions. It’s a lot of fun. I think he’s having a lot of fun continuing to learn the business. The founders are having a lot of fun working with Bobby and leveraging his platform. We’re very lucky to have him involved.

What is one thing your employees don’t know about you?

I have a younger brother who is doing a joint degree right now between UW Law and the Harvard Kennedy School. He’s much smarter than me. He’s very talented. Keep an eye out for the name Simon Borumand. He’s my best friend. I think about getting him the opportunity to come back and build a career in this ecosystem, maybe more on the political side given his background and interests.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cameron Borumand

General and founding partner at Fuse