Bedrock II: $350 Million Dollars More for Narrative Violations

By Geoff Lewis and Eric Stromberg

When we launched Bedrock last March, we wrote that our mission as a firm is to search for narrative violations: promising companies that are overlooked or underestimated because they are incongruent with popular narratives. Today, we’re pleased to share that Bedrock has closed an oversubscribed $350 million second fund to support our mission. As with Fund I, our focus remains leading or co-leading Series A and B venture capital rounds. The firm now manages over $475 million across two funds.

In addition to Geoff and Eric collectively being amongst our own larger investors in Bedrock II, we are humbled to be stewards of capital for many leading institutions doing work we believe in — from funding research to cure debilitating disease to providing pensions to retirees who depend on them.

In a world awash with venture capital, raising a new fund is not an achievement to be celebrated, but rather a responsibility to be taken extraordinarily seriously. Most venture capital funds lose money. Building one of the rare firms that consistently does not lose money on its funds — but rather generates outlier returns — is extraordinarily hard, and we believe it will only get harder over the years to come.

With our first fund, we’ve worked very hard to identify, invest in, and support entrepreneurs who are bending the narrative toward new realities by sheer force of will. And we’ve done so with what we believe to be rare conviction, e.g. over 30% of the capital we’ve invested from our first fund thus far has been invested into a single company. But the hard work has just begun. Much like the companies we back, our mindset at Bedrock is that we must re-earn the right to exist as a firm each day through relentlessly executing on our mission.

However the hard work brings us great joy, because our narrative violations mission is authentic not only to who we are as investors, but also as individuals. As public high school students in Calgary, Canada and suburban Maryland respectively, you would not have picked either Geoff or Eric out of a line up as destined to become technology entrepreneurs — as we each were earlier in our careers — or to build a venture capital firm, as we’re doing now. Yet through a series of counterintuitive decisions and calculated risks taken both individually and collectively over a decade of friendship we now find ourselves here… alongside a team of uniquely talented individuals united by our shared mission.

We extend a heartfelt thank you to the entrepreneurs who’ve chosen to accept capital from Bedrock, and a heartfelt thank you to the limited partners who’ve chosen to capitalize our search for narrative violations with an additional $350 million.

Lets go!