Kagan Investments

Private Angel Capital

Angel capital with institutional discipline.

I’m Roman Kagan. I invest my own capital in early-stage startups — each one priced through the same valuation rigor used at leading firms, in exchange for straightforward equity.

Pitch your startup How I invest

Kagan Investments

Valuation
Scorecard · comps · VC method
Investment
Capital, wired
Equity
SAFE or priced round
Roman KaganInvestor In exchange for equity

The thesis

Three commitments.

Operator first

I build production AI systems for a living. When I invest you get capital plus an engineer who has shipped: architecture reviews, hiring filters, and honest technical diligence.

Institutional discipline

Every company goes through the same valuation process used at leading investment firms — scorecard, comparable-company analysis, and the VC method — arriving at a fair pre-money number both sides can defend.

Founder-clean terms

Investment in exchange for equity on standard instruments — a SAFE or a priced round. No exotic structures, no control games, no surprises at your next raise.

The process

From pitch to partnership.

  1. Introduction

    Send a short note and a deck: what you build, who buys it, where the numbers stand. A warm intro helps but is not required.

  2. Review

    I do the work myself — product, market, team, and the technical claims under the hood. If it’s AI, I read past the demo.

  3. Valuation

    The discipline you’d meet at a name-brand firm: scorecard and comparable-company analysis, cross-checked with the VC method. A defensible pre-money valuation, on paper, shared with you.

  4. Terms

    Capital in exchange for equity on standard instruments, with cap-table math you can raise on later.

  5. Partnership

    After the wire: architecture reviews, introductions, hiring help, and a direct line — the things an operator-angel is actually for.

The bar

What I look for.

  • A working product, or the shortest credible path to one.
  • Founders who ship — velocity is the only moat that compounds.
  • Honest numbers, including the ugly ones.
  • A market that punishes incumbents for standing still.

I’m most at home in AI-native software — agents, search and retrieval, applied machine intelligence — but conviction travels.

The investor

Operator, then investor.

I’m Roman Kagan — engineer, operator, and angel investor. I build production AI systems: Claude skills, agents, and the retrieval infrastructure behind them. My consulting practice lives at kagan.ai, where I also write the Agentic AI Series — a seventeen-volume, 306-pattern reference for agentic AI engineering. The practice spans RelevantSearch.AI and Softfinity.

Kagan Investments is where I put my own capital behind founders I believe in.

For founders

The best introduction is a short note and a deck.

  • What you build, and for whom
  • Traction and numbers as they stand
  • The raise, and what it buys
romankagan@gmail.com →