An early bet on Solana and others has led to a new, $500M fund for Foundation Capital – TechCrunch

Foundation Capital, an early-stage enterprise agency with places of work in Palo Alto and San Francisco, has been round for 27 years, in many iterations. It has been sprawling, it has been small, it has thrived, it has teetered.

In 2022, it’s in enlargement mode as soon as once more. Three years after closing its ninth fund with $350 million in capital commitments with three common companions, the agency is saying that it has secured $500 million for its tenth flagship fund. It now has six common companions, having promoted two of its traders to common associate and hired former founder Angus Davis. And it has a lot of offers in its portfolio that undoubtedly proceed to excite its traders.

Among these is the fast-growing NFT market OpenSea, the buzzy public blockchain platform Solana (Foundation was its first institutional investor) and Cohesity, a knowledge administration vendor that confidentially filed to go public final month and is reportedly in search of a valuation of between $5 billion and $10 billion. (For context, Cohesity was valued by its personal traders final March at $3.7 billion.)

How to clarify Foundation’s rebound? Strong connections to founders and their varied networks would appear to clarify a part of it. It’s a profit loved by any agency that has been across the block a few instances and handled individuals effectively en route.

Foundation has additionally extra aggressively embraced the unknown, shifting away from metrics and towards people who haven’t began a firm but however are on the cusp of constructing the leap. These is likely to be operators inside huge corporations, or founders returning to the startup enviornment, or groups getting ready to spin out of academia. As explains Ashu Garg, who joined Foundation in 2008 and is now one in all its longest-serving common companions, “Our purpose is to have a handshake cope with somebody as they’re prepared to begin the corporate. That’s the enterprise that we’re in. There isn’t any firm. That is our enterprise mannequin.”

It nearly sounds comical. But it’s no joke. Given the quantity of capital out there as we speak — all of it driving valuations sky excessive for even fledgling corporations — Foundation is joined by a rising variety of enterprise corporations that now zero in on people quite than wait on precise merchandise or groups to type. As VC Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures in LA recently told us of his personal staff, “We’ll even take a threat on you need to go away your organization . . . We will again you at formation — at day zero.”

Part of Foundation’s go-earlier technique facilities on incubating corporations. Some of the startups to stand up within Foundation lately embrace Cerebras, an AI chip and system startup firm that was valued at greater than $4 billion in a November spherical; the digital title, escrow and closing firm Doma (previously States Title), which went public final 12 months after merging with a blank-check firm (it has been a bumpy ride since); and Turing, an outfit that helps supply, vet and join builders with tech corporations that want them, and which raised $87 million in Series D funding final month.

Foundation, like different corporations, can be plugging extra money not simply into startups however rising enterprise corporations that give it entry to new networks and concepts. Steve Vassallo, one other longtime common associate on the agency, says it has dedicated roughly $15 million lately into no less than 53 completely different enterprise outfits that function “beacons” for Foundation offers.

Not final, Foundation has advanced the best way that it learns what’s effervescent up. Joanne Chen, a longtime member of the staff who was promoted to common associate final 12 months and could be very centered on synthetic intelligence, engages with VPs of engineering and technical founders who share concepts via Slack communities.

Meanwhile, the agency has companions who spend 10 hours a day making an attempt to determine which initiatives on GitHub are taking off,” says Vassallo. The staff — which could be very centered on the “automation of the enterprise” and fintech — can be spending much more time lately in Discord channels. “That’s for positive the place our crypto staff is,” says Vassallo, including that “it’s not a fabulous platform, nevertheless it’s one of the best of what exists” for these searching down web3 and DeFi offers.

If Foundation feels pressured to change into much more ingenious on this go-go market, it isn’t admitting as a lot.

Asked about loopy acts that Foundation has both seen or dedicated to land a deal, Vassallo says he’s conscious of “in depth love letters” that sure Foundation portfolio corporations have obtained between financings, however he says his companions are content material for now to stroll and speak with founders round Stanford’s campus or Salesforce Park in downtown San Francisco.

Garg echoes the sentiment, saying that he thinks “a few of the crazier issues people are doing to get the eye of founders will probably be tempered as markets cool down a little bit.”

He insists that Foundation would by no means have interaction in such antics both method. “We’re speaking with founders earlier than they’ve modified their LinkedIn. If we’re speaking with somebody concurrently Tiger [Global], then we’ve failed.”

https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/20/foundation-capital-tenth-fund/

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