heretic backs consumer founders working at the intersection of culture, commerce, and technology.
we start before day one
how we work
- we work with people who have not quit their job yet
- we prototype the idea before anyone commits to it
- we design the brand and the culture before the product
- we look for a structural advantage, not a head start
- capital is there on day one, not when the round closes
- the people who prototype it with you can join you full time
who we work with
- operators who have built someone else's company and want their own
- builders who take creative risks that could actually fail
- founders who came up outside the usual pipelines
- creators who watched the platform keep the bigger half
- people who can see the category before it has a name
- anyone told to go get more experience first
early partner to contrarian companies
mariam naficy
managing partner
Mariam Naficy is a serial entrepreneur and operator with more than 25 years of experience building consumer businesses at the intersection of commerce, creativity, and technology. She is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Minted, the design marketplace for creative goods that she built from scratch into a profitable business generating more than $300 million in annual sales.
At Minted, Mariam pioneered a new model for discovering and developing design talent: crowdsourcing the world's best emerging designers through competitions and giving consumers a voice in what the brand sold. She then built the systems to turn that model into a distinctive, scaled consumer business, from sourcing and manufacturing to quality control, pricing, and delivering beautifully made products. Her approach combines a sharp point of view on taste with a deep understanding of the operational discipline required to turn great design into a durable retail business.
Before Minted, Mariam co-founded Eve.com in 1998, a pioneering online cosmetics retailer, and later launched and ran The Body Shop International's e-commerce division. Today, as Founder and CEO of Arcade, she is applying that same operating lens to the next era of commerce, using AI to connect designers and brands with vetted makers around the world, with an emphasis on manufacturability, quality, customization, and speed to market.