NFX Launches $450M Pre-seed and Seed Fund

NFX

NFX, a San Francisco, CA- and Herzlia, Israel-based seed stage venture firm, launched its $450M third fund dedicated to pre-seed and seed-stage startups.

Founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneurs who founded and built 10 companies that exited for more than a cumulative $10 Billion and led by General Partners Gigi Levy-Weiss, Pete Flint, James Currier and Omri Amirav-Drory, Ph.D. (newly appointed), NFX invests in businesses driven by network effects. The firm, which manages $875M in total assets, pairs network effects knowledge with other resources to help take founders from idea to IPO.

Fund III is expected to support 70 companies whose founders specialize in fintech, marketplaces, gaming, and proptech sectors, and to increase investment in tech-bio and crypto. At $450M, Fund III is the firm’s largest to date, having raised $275m for Fund II in 2019 and $150m for Fund I in 2017. NFX leads or co-leads investments and is the first institutional investor in 95% of the companies it backs and roughly 15-20% of their investments are in pre-seed.

Omri Amirav-Drory will be leading the firm’s division dedicated to companies at the intersection of biology and tech. Emily Leproust, Ph.D, co-founder and CEO of Twist Bioscience, is also part of the NFX Bio Investment Committee.

NFX Fund III also bolstered its crypto expertise, adding Morgan Beller as General Partner last year. Beller is the co-creator of Diem (fka Libra), the cryptocurrency effort launched by Facebook, previously worked in corporate development at Medium, and was a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Since Fund I, the firm has grown from three GPs to five, from 16 employees to 45, and opened offices in San Francisco, Israel and Palo Alto. NFX plans to leverage this new fund to build an enhanced network and services to allow founders get faster in the market.

FinSMEs

05/10/2021