Alan Doan

Bootstrapped a $100M business → Now thinking about town building, commerce, and physical worlds

📍 Kansas City Metropolitan Area, United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 19 investments📅 18 years investing🗓 Last invested Jan 2022𝕏 @upgrade_to_unlock
VC🌍 United States
19
Total investments
12
Early stage
3
Mid stage
1
Late stage
18y
Years active

Portfolio

18 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Investor
Aug 2020
Create revenue-generating experiences powered by your expertise in minutes. No cost to set up. Start today for free!
Investor
Jul 2019
Sun & Swell Foods provides nourishing, naturally delicious plant-based snacks in eco-friendly, plastic-free packaging. Our products ensure high-quality, sustainable choices for health-conscious consumers and businesses alike. We offer a line of shelf-stable snacks including Real Food Bars, Dried Fruits, and Trail Mixes - in both single-serve and bulk sizes. Our snacks are loved in corporate office breakrooms, hotels, coffee shops, and more.
Investor
Apr 2019
Cooklist builds the infrastructure for agentic grocery commerce. We help retailers deploy AI assistants that do more than chat. Our agents reason over shopper intent, search the catalog, check inventory, apply business rules, and assemble products into cart-ready solutions. Shoppers don’t want a thousand search results. They want dinner. Cooklist turns goals into filled carts. Our platform includes: • On-site AI Shopping Assistants (web + app) • Agentic Search for complex, long-tail grocery intent • Cart-ready product bundles and substitutions • Retailer control plane with business rules and governance • Insights that translate conversations into merchandising signals Cooklist integrates directly into retailer environments using existing APIs and data. The experience is retailer-branded, inventory-aware, and policy-controlled. We specialize in grocery. Culinary logic, dietary strictness, private label prioritization, retail media integration, and substitution systems are first-class features, not afterthoughts. We launch quickly. Recent national grocer deployment: live in 41 days from contract signature. Shoppers save time, build bigger baskets, and keep coming back.
Investor
Jan 2019
Artifact is CX Forecasting. We help you anticipate customer problems and opportunities— and stay ahead and in control of your customer experience.
Investor
Apr 2018
Tersai is page rank for display advertising ​ Tersai has built the Internet Topology™, a living graph of the internet. It tells advertisers what a page is about and its relative value before they bid. It works on all browser-based inventory, desktop, mobile, banner, and video. Tersai analyzes pages, not people ​ It uses human-supervised machine learning to recognize content. It delivers extreme precision and confidence for targeting topic realms. It doesn’t use cookies, so it’s GDPR compliant. Tersai ranks every page for quality ​ It uses weighted references to calculate a page’s magnitude within a realm. It leaves junk pages behind. Its gives a relative value to all good pages. Tersai delivers results ​ You will get more high-value traffic from small pockets all over the internet. Your ads will show on more brand-safe pages. You will get many more quality clicks (and many fewer fake clicks). In the end, you will radically lower your cost of acquisition.
Investor
Jan 2018
VMP exists to create a deeper connection to music for all. We are storytellers, curators & a community who understand the impact a great album can have on someone. And, we are firm believers that vinyl is the best medium for creating these experiences. We’re fascinated by the long (sometimes grueling) journey a record takes by the time it’s in your hands — from artist to studio to pressing plant, and beyond. Because of our dedication to the process and the people behind it, we put tremendous effort into building relationships and always work with partners whose expertise, knowledge, skill and passion allow us to deliver the best product we can. We take time getting to know the stories behind every record, listening to test pressings and reviewing art before production even begins. We don’t just do this because it’s our job — we do it because we absolutely love vinyl and all that goes into it. Our mission is what compels us to celebrate and champion the culture, history and art of great albums. We would never expect you to love everything that we release, but we promise you'll find something here that is new to you and deepens your relationship with music.
late stageMusicians
Investor
Aug 2017
At Bloom Institute of Technology (also called BloomTech), our mission is to provide learners with a direct, low risk path to a higher income.
Investor
Apr 2017
Mercato connects you to local specialty food shops. Order fresh local groceries online from the stores you love, and have them delivered to your door. You can select from individual items and curated lists and order all of the ingredients to a recipe with one click. Learn more about us at www.mercato.com.
Investor
Jan 2017
Experience First. The creators of Sprucebot: The first ever Guest Experience Bot. Born in a store and built to enhance human-to-human connections. Purveyors of the #guestfirstmovement!
early stageRetail
Investor
Dec 2016
Pura is a smart fragrance brand offering an innovative way to fill your home with premium, customizable scents. App-controlled features empower you to control fragrance intensity, set schedules, and swap scents from your smartphones. With options for personalized settings, safe & clean fragrances, and partnerships with luxury fragrance brands, Pura provides a unique, sustainable, and elevated scenting experience to transform any space.
Investor
May 2016
Health care is anything but simple. We’re here to change that. We put patients first in everything we do, designing products that fit into your life and save you time and money.
Investor
Feb 2016
Medolac is committed to improving access to human donor milk for preterm infants in the NICU. Founded by serial entrepreneur Elena Medo, who founded Prolacta Bioscience, North American Instruments, and the White River breast pump - Medolac was developed to address disparity of care in the NICU by improving access to human milk. Medolac offers a complete line of products with vastly improved safety, better quality and lower cost. The entire product line is commercially sterile, stored at room temperature, homogenized and 100% human donor milk. Currently serving leading hospitals across the United States.
Investor
Jul 2015
At LoyaltyLion, we help Shopify brands increase repeat purchases with their own integrated loyalty programs that motivate shoppers with unique loyalty experiences. We provide the tools and expertise you need to drive growth through higher repeat purchase rates, better retention and greater customer lifetime value. We are the leading loyalty platform in our space - we were the first to integrate with Shopify and we are #1 on G2 today. Visit us: https://loyaltylion.com/ Talk to us: https://loyaltylion.com/demo
Investor
Mar 2015
Hickory is the only training tool focused on retention, turning your sales and customer service staff into brand experts. 70% of training is forgotten within 5 days. Hickory’s proprietary algorithm predicts when each employee will forget what they've learned and ensures their product knowledge remains up to date by sending targeted reinforcement exercises.
Show all 18 investments ↓
Experience · 26 entries
All (26)
Investments (18)
Founder (5)
2022
2020
Investor
Aug 2020
Create revenue-generating experiences powered by your expertise in minutes. No cost to set up. Start today for free!
2019
Pretzel
Founder
Aug 2019
Investor
Jul 2019
Sun & Swell Foods provides nourishing, naturally delicious plant-based snacks in eco-friendly, plastic-free packaging. Our products ensure high-quality, sustainable choices for health-conscious consumers and businesses alike. We offer a line of shelf-stable snacks including Real Food Bars, Dried Fruits, and Trail Mixes - in both single-serve and bulk sizes. Our snacks are loved in corporate office breakrooms, hotels, coffee shops, and more.
Investor
Apr 2019
Cooklist builds the infrastructure for agentic grocery commerce. We help retailers deploy AI assistants that do more than chat. Our agents reason over shopper intent, search the catalog, check inventory, apply business rules, and assemble products into cart-ready solutions. Shoppers don’t want a thousand search results. They want dinner. Cooklist turns goals into filled carts. Our platform includes: • On-site AI Shopping Assistants (web + app) • Agentic Search for complex, long-tail grocery intent • Cart-ready product bundles and substitutions • Retailer control plane with business rules and governance • Insights that translate conversations into merchandising signals Cooklist integrates directly into retailer environments using existing APIs and data. The experience is retailer-branded, inventory-aware, and policy-controlled. We specialize in grocery. Culinary logic, dietary strictness, private label prioritization, retail media integration, and substitution systems are first-class features, not afterthoughts. We launch quickly. Recent national grocer deployment: live in 41 days from contract signature. Shoppers save time, build bigger baskets, and keep coming back.
Show all 26 entries ↓
Investment activity
2008–2022 · 19 investments
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