Craft Ventures, the venture firm launched in 2017 by serial entrepreneur David Sacks, has closed its second fund with $500 million in capital commitments, an amount the firm was said to begin targeting roughly a year ago.
Craft’s debut fund had closed with $350 million.
The outfit — which Sacks runs with other serial entrepreneurs Bill Lee (Remarq, Social Concepts), Jeff Fluhr (StubHub, Spreecast), and Sky Dayton (who has founded and cofounded a lot of companies) — invests in series seed through B rounds, in a wide range of companies that neatly fit into each investor’s wheelhouse.
For his part, Sacks, who was the COO of PayPal before founding the genealogy website Geni.com, then Yammer, is focused on both consumer and enterprise startups as long as they can go viral. His signature bet at Craft is Bird, the e-scooter company whose Series A round Craft had led. (Bird founder Travis VanderZanden announced the company’s Series D round of $275 million at a $2.5 billion valuation at our recent TechCrunch Disrupt event.)
Fluhr meanwhile focuses on marketplaces and e-commerce startups and the firm cites as one of his more prominent deals the Series A round of the nursing marketplace Trusted Health. Lee is focused on breakthrough technologies and counts among his investments the esports company Cloud9, a company that went on to raise $50 million in Series B funding last year (and is probably due to announce yet another round soon). And Dayton — who is very notably a cofounder with Travis Kalanick in CloudKitchens, the dark kitchen company that’s literally trying to take over the world) — focuses on so-called hard tech, drawing on his experience with launching the dial-up pioneer EarthLink, along with the WiFi service provider Boingo Wireless.
Some of the Craft’s more recent bets include Terminal, a San Francisco-based startup that helps companies to source and manage remote engineers in international locations; it raised $17 million in funding just last month. Another of its deals is Internal, a months-old, San Francisco-based startup that wants to help companies better manage their internal consoles so they can ensure that not everyone on staff has access to sensitive data. It closed on $5 million in seed funding led by Craft last month, a deal we’d written about here.
At firm’s outset, blockchain was a major theme, according to Sacks, though the firm appears to fast-evolving into an outfit that invests far more broadly. Indeed, Harbor, a decentralized compliance protocol designed to standardize the way crypto securities are issued and traded — and a deal that was among Craft’s first — saw its founders leave to start Integral (above) earlier this year.
source: TechCrunch
