The early-stage venture capital firm took a unique take on the industry by spearheading public relations for its portfolio companies.
Through Fund I ($20 million) and Fund II ($50 million), the Silicon Valley firm’s portfolio has had 22 exits, including an IPO with Terran Orbital.
It also has backed eight unicorns, including Superhuman, Remote, Worldcoin, Truebill (which exited to Rocket Companies in 2021) and DuckDuckGo.
“When we connected, he was already the founder of three unicorns, which was quite surprising,” Bucher told TechCrunch.
A year later, Bucher exited M&A PR Studio and started Day One Ventures.
Switzerland-based Proton, the privacy-focused firm behind end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) webmail ProtonMail and other apps, has acquired Standard Notes, a note-taking app founded back in 2017.
By adding Standard Notes to its portfolio of apps, Proton will deepen its reach with an engaged community of pro-privacy users, layering on additional cross-selling opportunities as well as boosting the utility of its app ecosystem.
And while there is some usage overlap, a Proton spokesperson said that less than a quarter of Standard Notes users are already Proton users.
Proton said the Standard Notes app, which is available for both mobile and desktop, will remain “open source, freely available and fully supported”.
Commenting in a statement, Mo Bitar, founder and CEO of Standard Notes, talked up the sense of shared mission.
Autism Impact Fund (AIF) was a pioneer when it emerged in 2021, three years after the son of its co-founder and managing partner, Chris Male, was diagnosed with ASD.
A joint effort of Male and others, its ambition was to become “the investment and innovation arm of the autism community,” Male told TechCrunch.
Since then, startups in the neurodiversity space gathered momentum, and so did AIF, which recently closed its first fund at $60 million.
AIF’s decision to broaden its scope has to do with autism itself, Male said.
It’s also global, with healthtech Genial Care raising $10 million to help kids with autism and their families in Brazil.
Giant Ventures in January closed two new funds totaling $250 million that it will invest in startups on both sides of the Atlantic, and today, TechCrunch has learned exclusively that Frontline Ventures has also raised $200 million across two funds, named Frontline Growth and Frontline Seed.
Frontline has historically invested in both Europe and North America, and its new funds will continue to follow that strategy, betting on B2B software companies.
The new seed fund will favor European ventures, while the growth fund will focus on U.S. startups.
Expansion roadmapO’Donnell told TechCrunch that when it helps portfolio companies navigate expansion to another market, Frontline focuses on four aspects: timing, go-to-market strategy, talent, and organizational design and location.
That’s by order of importance, and a company’s location should be a derivative of the previous three aspects, O’Donnell said.
Sameer Brij Verma, a high-profile investor at the Indian venture firm Nexus, will be leaving the fund later this year, he confirmed to TechCrunch.
Verma plans to launch his own venture firm, with the inaugural fund expected to have a corpus of at least $150 million, a source familiar with the matter said.
The timing of his departure is also peculiar as Nexus raised a $700 million fund, its largest, just last year.
Verma has been working with his portfolio startups to hand over board seats to other partners at Nexus for several months, the source said, requesting anonymity.
Verma plans to launch his own fund by the end of the year where he plans to adopt a strategy that sets him apart from other investment firms in India.
Silence wants to shake things up when it comes to climate tech investment.
This new angel-style VC firm has already raised $35 million and plans to make dozens of small investments in climate startups to help them apply the tech startup playbook.
He also founded Merlin, an hourly jobs marketplace in the U.S.With Silence, Borja wants to apply his experience to climate investment.
A silent partnerSince the first close of the fund in June 2022, Silence has already invested in 22 different companies.
So we told them ‘we’ll be your lead,’” Borja said.
LACERA decreases venture capital allocation range, but experts say it doesn’t signal a trend Analysts say this is likely more of a one-off than a sign that LP interest in venture is waning.
The Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association (LACERA) voted to decrease its allocation range to venture capital at a March 13 meeting.
The board of investments voted to decrease its allocation range to venture capital and growth equity from between 15% and 30% of the pension system’s private equity portfolio, to between 5% and 25%.
LACERA’s venture portfolio is currently 10.8% of the PE portfolio.
“They aren’t going to cut their venture allocation.
Two years ago, he launched Ballistic Ventures with an inaugural $300 million fund, a laser focus on cybersecurity, an interesting business model, and a who’s-who of investing partners.
Now Ballistic has already closed a second fund, even bigger than the first.
“We set out to raise a second $300 million fund and stopped at $360 million,” Schlein told TechCrunch.
Ballistic formally registered its plans for a second fund just four months ago, in November, TC was first to report.
The Ballistic team also includes general partner Kevin Mandia, the former CEO of Mandiant, which sold to Google in 2022.
Playground Global, the storied early-stage venture capital firm, brought in $410 million in capital commitments for its Fund III to invest in early-stage deep tech and science companies.
With Fund III, similar to its $500 million Fund II raised in 2017, capital deployments in Fund III will focus on seed and Series A companies with initial investments ranging from $1 million to $20 million.
For Fund III, we broadened our LP base to include endowments, foundations, and single and multifamily offices.
When we founded Playground, our team was purpose-built to help develop both consumer technologies and deep tech companies.
We’ve been investing in deep tech companies since we founded Playground, with PsiQuantum being one of our very first investments.
