A New Trend in Venture Funding – Segmenting by Startup Stage

This Week in Venture Capital–Episode 7–Dana Settle

  

I was listening to the above Episode 7 of the ‘This Week in Venture Capital’ podcast today, where Mark Suster interviews Dana Settle, a partner with Greycroft Partners.  See podcast summary here.

At the 8:35 minute mark, Mark and Dana discuss a new venture capital market segmenting trend where different funds are available to startups /ventures at different stages of their growth cycle. In this way VC’s can better focus on the different issues that affect startups at various stages.

I found this intriguing. I summarize the segments they discussed below:

Note: [CB] references below link to more info from CrunchBase on the applicable fund and its recent financings.

Super Angel / Seed Funds

Early Stage Funds

  • Smaller than traditional VC
  • Funds with $50 to $125 million in capital
  • Write cheques from $750K to $1 million
  • They like to see a product launch with first cracks at revenue generation to prove the idea can be monetized
  • Representative Firms: First Round Capital [CB], Greycroft Partners [CB], True Ventures [CB]

A Round Funds

B Round Funds (Traditional Growth/Equity Firms)

Growth Equity Funds
(not discussed in podcast but mentioned in the podcast summary)

Of course few venture funds fall absolutely in any one of the above categories.

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