Matthew Cowan

Matthew Cowan is a veteran venture and growth-equity investor who joined Next47 — the venture firm founded by Siemens — in 2017–2018, where he serves as a General Partner based in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the firm (now rebranded as N47), he focuses on applying AI at the application layer to drive automation and efficiency in underserved and traditional industries, investing across enterprise applications and infrastructure.

Before Next47, Cowan was co-founder and CEO of Breezeworks, a mobile CRM and automation platform for service professionals and small-business owners. Earlier, he co-founded the growth-equity firm Bridgescale Partners (mid-2000s) with partner Rob Chaplinsky, where his investments and exits included cybersecurity company Proofpoint (IPO), compensation-software firm Xactly (IPO), Jasper Wireless (acquired by Cisco), Rypple (acquired by Salesforce), Dayforce/Ceridian, Plum Organics, and BitGo.

Cowan's investing career began in the late 1990s: he was the founding General Partner of Bowman Capital's venture capital group in 1998, focused on expansion-stage technology companies. Before that, he worked in Intel Corporation's business development group focused on broadband and internet media — an experience he credits for shaping his principles around elegant system design. He holds a BA from Tufts University.

Cowan is known publicly for championing the "camel" model of company-building over the "unicorn" model — resilient, capital-efficient businesses that prove positive unit economics before scaling, a thesis he articulated in interviews and a 2020 Crunchbase News piece during the COVID-19 period.

• Invests pre-seed through Series A (occasionally Series B), typically writing checks of ~$100K–$5M, sweet spot around $1.5M.
• Central thesis: build "camels, not unicorns" — companies that are resilient, cautious with reserves, committed to positive unit economics, and customer-focused, rather than burning capital to chase growth.
• In his words: *"It's okay to lose a lot of money building a company you have to, but if your unit economics have never been positive, the only metric you're going to do is figure out how fast you can burn cash."*
• Contrasts unicorn thinking — *"Let's spend a hundred million dollars on marketing; we'll figure out the unit economics later"* — with camels that "hammer out unit economics first, then scale."
• What makes him say yes in founders: *"Relentless tenacity, a bold vision of a future world, and a grounded execution plan. Head in the clouds, feet on the ground."*
• Sector interest centers on AI applied to the application layer, enterprise software/infrastructure, robotics, IoT, cybersecurity, and the logistics/supply-chain and vertical-software markets.