Foundry Group, the Boulder, Colo.-based venture firm co-founded 11 years ago by startup whisperer Brad Feld, has raised a $750 million seventh fund to target early-stage and growth-stage companies, as well as to invest in other venture funds.
It sounds like — and is — a lot of money, though the firm notes that it encompasses all of its various investment strategies, whereas its last fund, a $500 million vehicle that it closed in 2016, was used to invest in other venture funds and growth-stage companies alone; Foundry was separately managing its early-stage bets in a different fund.
It’s a little confusing, but if you really want to know the details, Feld breaks them out in a post:
For historical reference, our early-stage funds (FG 2007, FG 2010, FG 2013, and FG 2016) are all $225 million in size. Our first early growth fund raised in 2013, Foundry Group Select, is also $225m in size. In 2016, when we raised Foundry Group Next, we approximately doubled the size of that fund to $500 million since 30% of it was going to be invested in partner funds and 70% in early growth. So, at the beginning of 2016, we effectively raised $725 million (FG 2016 and Foundry Group Next). Foundry Group Next 2018 is simply the combination of those two funds rounded up slightly.
Foundry was founded by Feld, Ryan McIntyre, Jason Mendelson and Seth Levine — “four equal partners,” as Feld describes them.
With this newest fund, he says, Foundry now has “seven equal partners,” meaning each receives the same amount of carry — or profits from the firm’s successful investments — no matter that three of the partners are newer to the table.
Foundry’s newer partners include Lindel Eakman, who joined in 2015 to help Foundry identify venture funds in which to invest. (Very meta, we know.) Eakman had previously spent 13 years with the University of Texas Investment Management Company (or UTIMCO), which was Foundry Group’s largest investor.
The firm last year also added Chris Moody, who’d been the CEO of Twitter data reseller Gnip before Twitter acquired the company in 2014 and made Moody a GM and VP of its data and enterprise business. (Foundry was an investor in Gnip.)
The firm’s newest partner is Jamey Sperans, who was as an early member and managing director of Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, where he served on the global investment and executive committees. Sperans, who joined earlier this year, has also founded five companies over the years.
In case you are wondering, yes, that is seven men. (Just remarking.)
Foundry has had at least 44 exits over the years, according to Crunchbase. Among its most recent wins: the email service provider SendGrid, which staged a successful IPO last November; and the 2015 IPO of Fitbit, the wearable device company, whose shares are trading at roughly $5.50 apiece right now but were as high as $47 in the months after the offering.
Among Foundry’s newest investments is Chowbotics, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Calif.-based company that makes a salad-making robot and raised $11 million in Series A-1 funding last month; and Sensu, a year-old, Portland, Ore.-based full-stack monitoring platform that raised $10 million in Series A funding back in April.
It has also re-upped in plenty of its portfolio companies in recent months, including Urban Airship, an eight-year-old, Portland, Ore.-based company behind a digital customer engagement platform. In June, it raised $25 million in Series F funding led by Foundry, which had also led the company’s Series B round in 2010.
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