Our Team
We are Founders investing in Founders. In addition to funding, Seed Round Capital's seasoned entrepreneurs can help you avoid the common pitfalls and provide you with proven fundraising methods specially formulated to expedite your early-stage growth. Our mentors are all seasoned entrepreneurs who are passionate about helping you grow your company.
Our seasoned mentors have successfully founded and managed multiple businesses, most with over 25 years of experience.
If you are pre-revenue, our advisors can guide you on de-risking the technical path, getting from prototype to pilot, and identifying the right non-dilutive funding (SBIR and similar) to extend your runway.
Brad Jenkins, Co-Founder and CEO
Brad founded 6 companies and exited 4 of them, including CloudNine.com, a bootstrapped legal‑tech company he scaled and sold. Now he partners with deep‑tech and dual‑use founders who don’t fit neatly into generalist VC boxes. Most of the founders he works with are building technically complex products in markets that take time to mature, with defense, dual‑revenue, or government ‑adjacent models that most investors struggle to underwrite. If you’re raising a pre‑seed or seed round and want an investor who will truly engage with your technology and market, he’d like to talk. He is a graduate of Texas A&M and holds a BBA in Marketing with extensive coursework in computer science.
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Austin Hill, Co-Founder and Managing Director
Austin is a serial entrepreneur that has started companies in distribution, contracting, real estate, and consumer packaged goods. Prior to his entrepreneurial endeavors, he deployed to Iraq as an Army officer, and later worked as an outside sales engineer at a fortune 50 company. Austin was one of the winners of Rice’s inaugural Veterans Business Battle business plan competition and is now an active investor in the competition through Beachhead investments and helps facilitate the Houston Entrepreneurs’ Organization accelerator program. Austin holds an MBA with honors from the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business and an engineering degree with honors from the United States Military Academy at West Point.
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Ada Ryland is an early-stage startup strategist. and an award-winning founder trainer and coach. Her seasoned, unique approach integrates customer development, business modeling, market strategy, systems thinking and advanced lean methodology into a framework that organizes the complexity of the new business and brings clarity to the action plan to reach Product-Market Fit. Ada is a mechanical engineer with corporate engineering and manufacturing experience as well as a former IBM consultant, training developer, and program manager for processes involving startup evaluation and intrapreneurial innovation. She is currently an instructor at several pre-accelerators and accelerators and is a certified coach on Ash Maurya's LEANSTACK platform. Ada has worked directly with over 300 founders in their early stage and earned the Top Expert award by MassChallenge in 2019.
Mark is an expert growth strategist, focusing on purpose, culture, and process. A lifelong entrepreneur, he now spends his time helping people get what they want from their businesses. He is a Certified EOS Implementor, an executive coach, and he hosts a weekly podcast called "You're Doing It Wrong" that helps entrepreneurial leaders break through their barriers to personal and business growth.
Chris is a serial entrepreneur and strategic advisor, with a passion for steering business founders and executives through the complexities of business. He fosters the rigorous customer-centricity, traction-first mentality, and accountability it takes for companies to launch, grow, and scale successfully in today’s crowded markets. Chris helps founders shift from a product-mindset to one of creating connections, experiences, and clarity for customers and stakeholders. Companies who’ve worked with ExecFire have exponentially grown revenue, launched new business lines, and successfully pivoted their business models to meet changing industry trends and customer demands. As a founder and a strategic advisor, Chris' direct expertise has been built by and applied to business endeavors in a wide array of industries and business models: B2B services, med-tech & med-device, high-tech, blockchain, ecommerce, accounting, and more. 
Andrea Spirov is a strategic communications professional with 20 years of experience in marketing and media. Throughout her international career she was worked across a variety of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail, energy, hospitality, travel and the news media, with clients like Target, Tetley, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Chevron, and Coca-Cola. Ms. Spirov became a StoryBrand Certified Guide in 2019 and holds a Master of Arts degree in Media & Communications.
Feras Mousilli is a partner of Lloyd & Mousilli and advises businesses on law issues. He specializes in counseling technology companies, with clients from start-ups through Amazon. Mr. Mousilli served as Senior Counsel to both Apple and Dell and was an Associate with DLA Piper as a registered U.S. Patent Attorney. He is a Guest Lecturer at the University of Texas and U.C. Berkeley schools of law. He holds degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science, a Masters in Computer Science Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Texas School of Law.
David Kelly is an award-winning startup entrepreneur, marketer, and growth expert. From managing a $50,000 per month Google AdWords & Facebook Ads budget for News Corp. to being the first full-time marketer for Student Loan Hero (sold to LendingTree for $60 million cash), David is an expert in proven marketing and growth strategies. Currently, David is the General Manager of SendFox & KingSumo — which he helped grow from $0 to $100,000 in monthly revenue with a zero-dollar ad budget. He's also been a growth consultant for Sumo.com, Sticker Mule, NextVacay, and dozens of other fast-growing startups.
Stacie is a startup storyteller. Founder of Pitch Deck Fire, an early-stage pitch strategy and design agency that has helped thousands of entrepreneurs across the world and in varied industries to better tell their story through professional, compelling, and effective pitch decks. Punchy copy, narrative-driven structure, and memorable design are imperative for early-stage marketing collateral. Stacie’s expert pitch coaching, helps founders perfect and fine-tune their deck content, story, and design. Large companies like Google's Area 120 internal incubator and first-time founders alike trust Stacie to provide immense, actionable insights in one-on-one pitch strategy sessions. Armed with better pitches, her founder-clients confidently raise angel, seed and Series A funding, win pitch competitions, and gain critical early customer traction. 
Melanie is a Co-Founder of Strategic Piece. Strategic Piece helps B2B companies deliver exceptional revenue growth by uniting marketing, sales, and service teams around an information-driven customer experience built on the HubSpot platform. She is an active angel investor and mentor at Rice University’s OwlSpark and University of Houston’s RED Labs student accelerator programs. Prior to Strategic Piece, Melanie was President of Marketing Interface, which she founded in 2014, after serving as Director of Marketing at SURGE Accelerator/SURGE Ventures. Melanie earned a BA in International Development from McGill University, Montreal and an MBA from Rice University, Houston.
Alex's bread and butter is digital strategy with a focus on paid performance marketing. Annually, he’s managed 8-figure marketing budgets that generated 9-figure returns for clients globally. During that time, Alex and his team won numerous digital marketing awards by building a handful of innovative marketing technologies for search, display & social channels. He now runs a multi-award winning team at Lockstep that helps businesses in the US, UK, Europe and Canada reach new heights and gain extraordinary returns from their online initiatives.
Mark is a seasoned producer of broadcast programming and corporate communications for brand development, stakeholder relations, employee communications, occupational safety training, customer relations, crisis communications and OSHA compliance. Television credits include several award-winning PBS documentaries. Mark is the owner and executive producer of a TV and film production company with numerous industry and community awards. Mark is also a Google certified and trusted photographer specializing in commercial 360 VR applications. Mark is a graduate of Trinity University.