About
02 — The Mark
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold.
Our logo mark symbolizes our core belief: early-stage cracks in a product, team, or story aren't dealbreakers; they are opportunities to step in, address the imperfections, and build enduring value.
01
The Name
An academic legend inspired the name “Carberry.”
Josiah S. Carberry is a fictional professor, known for his work in "psychoceramics,” the study of "cracked pots.”
03
Origin
An observation and an opportunity sparked Carberry.
Observation | After two decades of mentoring founders, Carberry founder Chad Billmyer, observed a clear structural funding gap: promising startups graduate from incubators with momentum, but often lack the refinement to secure institutional capital. We lean into this gap.
Opportunity | For five years, the nonprofit StartOut iterated and refined two of the country's top accelerator programs: Spark Lab and Growth Lab. The Labs helped over 150 ventures improve their products, teams, sales, and operations. But as a nonprofit, StartOut can’t invest in the ventures it helps grow. We designed a portion of Carberry's Fund I to financially support and accelerate the most promising StartOut portfolio ventures and to give LPs an opportunity to invest in those founders.
General Partner
Chad Billmyer
Chad served as SVP of Product at Goldman Sachs’ portfolio company, Slickdeals. Prior to Slickdeals, Chad founded Web-based SaaS and marketplace businesses. He served as a Managing Director at a $4B publicly traded company (NYSE: NNI) after they acquired his first start-up in the EdTech sector. Outside Carberry, Chad mentors startups in the UCLA, Brown, StartOut, and MuckerLab ecosystems. In an unrelated, random fun fact, Chad is the author of the illustrated children's book, "Curly Sue and the Beetle."