Capital Capital has come a long way since it is forced to measure its funds from $ 750 million in 2008 to $ 282 million (the sixth basic fund) In 2013.
On Tuesday, the 30-year-old company announced that it raised a $ 600 million eleven flagship funds, 20% greater than the predecessor of $ 500 million funds closed about three years ago.
The foundations have credited its resurrection by knitting its knitting: investment in the seed stage.
“Most companies in 30 years are usually lost in multi-stage, multi-geographic, multi-dangers. Instead we stayed focused on the early stages,” general partner Steve Vassallo told Techcrunch.
The foundation is the first institutional investor in more than 70% of its portfolio companies.
“We are looking for the so -called '$ 0 billion' market in Enterprise, AI, Fintech and Crypto,” Vassallo said. “These are the markets that do not exist until the founders will be.”
He explained that when Cerebras launched in 2016, from the Foundation Capital office, the AI chip market is almost nonexistent. “At that time, AI workloads were minuscule,” Vassallo explained, adding that NVIDIA GPUs were primarily used by players and graphic designers.
Since then, Cerebras has grown to a company worth $ 4.25 billion. The company filed a public S1 during the last fall but postponed its IPO Mainly due to a review of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
The Foundation Capital is also the first institutional investor on the blockchain platform Solana.
Other recent releases include the sale of Fraud Detection Company Evolutioniq to CCC for $ 730 million and the acquisition of the start of cybersecurity Venafi by Cyberk for $ 1.5 billion.
Vassallo compared how they were looking for founders in pre-criminals in the movie minority report. “Sometimes we were joking about getting to know the pre-founders before they left their last job,” he said.
The Foundation says that by creating new markets, the company's winning investment ends with the “owner of their categories,” leading to better outcomes.
Vassallo stated the company's ability to raise a greater fund than its predecessor In this market In the history of the high cash distribution company.
“We have returned nearly $ 1.4 billion back to our LPs in the last three years,” Vassallo said, adding that that amount was more than three times called by the firm (or requested) from the investors during the period.
Although the foundation is firmly attached to its early stages, it claims that it needs a larger fund because the size of seed deals and series A has grown, and the company wants to continue owning 15% to 20% of each company when it is invested first.
But one thing about the foundation is different now. Charles Moldow, a investor who spent almost 20 years with the firm and back -up companies such as Lendingclub, Rappi, and Kiavi, retired last year, left the foundation with four general partners.
