Shrug Capital

Overview

Shrug Capital is a venture firm led by Niv Dror and Moshe Lifschitz that invests in culturally relevant consumer companies (Shrug Capital). It backed Alt’s $75 million Series B in 2021, led Jake Paul’s W brand Series A in 2024, and co-led Varda Space’s $187 million Series C in 2025 (TechCrunch; Via Satellite).This profile covers Shrug Capital, the Dror and Lifschitz firm — not a similarly named fund or a directory entry — and follows it through its three best-documented deals.

A consumer firm built on culture and connections

Shrug’s own site is, in effect, a wall of founder testimony, and its recurring names are its leaders: Niv Dror and Moshe Lifschitz appear throughout as the people founders worked with, co-invested with, and took introductions from (Shrug Capital). Happi independently identifies Moshe Lifschitz as Shrug Capital’s managing partner in its report on the W round (Happi). The firm’s stated focus, in its own words, is culturally relevant companies, and the W announcement’s about-section describes its consumer portfolio as including MrBeast’s Feastables and Liquid Death (Happi). That last point is stated here with its attribution intact, because the independent deal reports read for this profile do not themselves confirm Feastables or Liquid Death as Shrug investments; the reader should treat it as the announcement’s description, not as independently verified deal history.

The Alt connection is independently verified and runs in both directions. TechCrunch lists Shrug Capital among the backers of Alt’s $75 million Series B in November 2021, alongside Spearhead, Seven Seven Six, Breyer Capital, Vibe Capital and Apollo Projects (TechCrunch). Shrug’s own site then records Alt founder Leore Avidar as both a founder who received funding from Shrug and an investor in Shrug, crediting Moshe and Niv with a marketing initiative for Alt and introductions to athletes, artists and operators (Shrug Capital). For a firm whose pitch is cultural relevance, that two-way relationship — investor in the company, and the company’s founder as an investor in the firm — is characteristic, and it is the one Alt relationship in this profile that rests on both an independent report and the firm’s own account.

Leading a creator brand, then co-leading a space round

W, the men’s personal care brand from boxer and content creator Jake Paul, announced a Series A led by Shrug Capital in July 2024 (Happi). Valued at north of $150 million, W had raised $14 million in funding to date, inclusive of seed financing and incubation from Anti Fund, with co-investors including Range Group, 305 Ventures, Uphonest Capital, Quiet Capital and Palm Tree Crew (Happi). Launched the previous month exclusively at Walmart, W had surpassed seven figures in sales and was reportedly on track to hit north of $50 million in sales by the end of its first year, with the new capital earmarked for product and retailer expansion (Happi). Lifschitz’s stated rationale was that legacy players in men’s personal care were losing market and mindshare, and that W had the characteristics of the brands that would shape the next generation of household brands (Happi).

A year later, Shrug’s verified deal-making jumped in both size and sector. Varda Space Industries raised a $187 million Series C in July 2025 to scale its work building in-space pharmaceutical labs and hypersonic reentry test capabilities, in a round led by Natural Capital and Shrug Capital, with Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Khosla Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Lux Capital and Also Capital participating (Via Satellite). Varda had by then completed three launch and re-entry missions, returning two capsules already that year, one in February and another in May, and was scaling up pharmaceutical talent including structural biologists and crystallisation scientists (Via Satellite). Varda chief executive Will Bruey said the capital would increase flight cadence and build out the pharmaceutical lab intended to deliver the world’s first microgravity-enabled drug formulation (Via Satellite). Whether that round marks a lasting sector expansion for Shrug or a single opportunistic co-lead is not something the sources read can answer, and this profile does not guess: it records the co-lead as the firm’s largest verified deal, and leaves the pattern question open.

What this profile does not claim

• No founding year is claimed: aggregators say 2018, but no fully-read independent source confirms it, so the timeline begins with the verified Alt backing in 2021.
• No headquarters city is claimed, for the same reason: aggregator claims were not verified from a fully-read independent source.
• No fund size, fund number, or assets under management is claimed, and no investment count is given, because those figures exist only in aggregators or in Shrug material not read in full.
• Feastables and Liquid Death are described only as the W announcement describes them, not as independently verified Shrug investments.
• No Shrug activity after the July 2025 Varda round is claimed.