Upfront Ventures, a Los Angels, CA-based early stage venture capital firm, has raised its 6th venture capital fund, at $400m.
Upfront VI, the firm’s latest core fund entrepreneurs, brings combined funds under management to nearly $2 billion.
Led by Mark Suster, Yves Sisteron, Greg Bettinelli, Kara Nortman, Kobie Fuller, and Kevin Zhang, the firm invests in the Seed or Series A rounds of about 15 new companies every year with a median check size of $2.8m.
Upfront invests nationally regardless of geography, from Chicago, Baltimore, London, San Francisco to Los Angeles, New York and Las Vegas, in startups operating in the follosing sectors:
– digital media,
– commerce technology and marketplaces,
– consumer goods and services, and
– SaaS.
In addition to core funds, the firm is also raising an opportunity fund (read here) to follow the full lifecycle of backed companies as they get bigger, reach later stages and require further capital. In these cases, they invest more than $20 million into a single company from opportunity funds and scaling to more than $40m in any one company across them. The goal is to fund startups from earliest stages and as they scale on their way to an IPO.
The team also includes: Hamet Watt, Steve Shafran, Wes Nichols, Brett Queener, Stuart Lander, Dana Kibler, Kerry Bennett, Chang Xu, Michael Carney, Riley McCluskey, Julian Kelly, Kyle Taylor, Audrey Lee, Nancy Davila, Jori Kaplan, Naheed Simjee and Rebecca Grotrian.
FinSMEs
03/07/2017