investors are apparently rising extra desirous about L.A. with the aid of the day. the most recent signal comes via a $ forty million fund that L.A.-primarily based Fika Ventures is announcing as of late.
That’s none too shabby for a mission agency that used to be founded just final 12 months.
Fika was once created with the aid of TX Zhuo, formerly a managing associate at Karlin Ventures, and Eva Ho, a former general companion and cofounder of San Francisco-based totally Susa Ventures who determined to not participate in that agency’s 2nd, $ 50 million seed-stage fund — a split that Ho characterizes as “highly amicable. I left as a result of i wished to center of attention extra on L.A-based totally investments, in addition to be a part of a smaller partnership. (Ho had three different companions at Susa.)
the two met in 2011, when Zhuo left a job as an affiliate with a Palo Alto outfit and headed to L.A. to launch Karlin, which is an affiliate of a a lot larger funding agency known as Karlin Asset administration. He and Ho wound up engaged on a couple of native occasions collectively, in addition to participating and co-best several days; over time, they realized they had complementary networks and like investing in an identical things.
Ho declines to take credit for any deals at Susa, announcing it “utilized a workforce-means across all deals,” but she says she was once interested in assisting companies that embody Andela, a startup presently building a community of high tier laptop science education programs across the African continent (it has gone on to raise $ 41 million so far, including from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative); Modsy, a startup bringing virtual truth to residence design (it has raised roughly $ 10 million, including from Norwest mission partners); and Flexport, a freight logistics firm that wishes to be the Uber of the oceans and has thus far raised at least $ 94 million towards that finish.
Zhou’s most notable offers in the meantime embody the interior design marketplace Laurel & Wolf (it has raised more than $ 25 million, together with from Benchmark) and PolicyGenius, an online insurance platform that has raised roughly $ 21 million, together with from Revolution.
Zhou and Ho says the fund took about six months to raise, together with from some money of cash, domestic workplaces, VCs, CEOs and founders — together with 15 from their earlier portfolios. they also attracted institutional investors cross Creek Advisors and Knollwood investment Advisory.
Their pitch? That Ho and Zhou have already helped build seed cash from scratch, they have already got relationships with later-stage VCs, and there aren’t a number of different seed money in L.A. which might be predominantly concerned about enterprise, industry-to-industry device, and platform-based totally companies. those that invested appreciated their moderately atypical backgrounds, says Ho. folks who handed don’t typically back first time managers or deemed the fund too small for the size checks they need to write or weren’t reasonably able to make a raffle on L.A.
Ho says Fika has already made three investments from its new fund, though can’t reveal any of those startups yet.
For future reference, the agency will make investments any place from $ 250,000 to $ 1 million in seed-stage corporations, and it’s going to be on the lookout for between 5 and 10 % ownership within the firm in trade. It expects that eighty % of its deals will likely be primarily based in L.A., with the remainder within the Bay space, ny, and Seattle.
asked about one of the best recommendation Ho has obtained so far about starting a new fund, she tells us it’s that “your best competitors will be yourselves, not all the different funds.
“Most money — and startups — die because of suicide, now not because of exogenous factors. We’ve taken that advice to heart, and we’re working laborious to ensure we construct the precise tradition and workforce dynamics to make this a sturdy and rewarding partnership.”
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