Acadian Ventures — Big Milestones, New Partner, New Opportunity

Three years ago we set out on a journey to create something special. Founders were telling us they wanted something different from their early investors — operational experience, market knowledge, and access to networks that could accelerate their vision. As we wrote in our “operating manual” back in 2019…

With the encouragement, support, and capital of our limited partners we launched Acadian Ventures with a vision to partner with exceptional founders anywhere in the world to build a new “future of work”. While still very early in our journey we believe our strategy is working. Our first fund is a top decile fund and I’m excited to share some of our initial performance metrics and what’s next for our firm.

Big Milestones

First, I wanted to share a little more about our journey. We have been actively investing out of our first fund for about 2.5 years. We made our first investment in May 2019 and eventually closed the fund in 2020 with <$15M in capital commitments. We purposely constrained our capital calls and pace of capital deployment to ensure we were disciplined in our decision-making.

We’ve invested in 19 companies to date and have deployed nearly 70% of our committed capital. We currently have 3 “unicorn” companies (although not all entered at the seed stage). I’m proud of our performance metrics to date…

🚀IRR-187%| 🎉 MOIC-3.4x| 📈 RVPI-3.0x|👍 TVPI-2.7x |💰 DPI-0.4x

Just as important, our core investments (seed stage) have >15% MRR growth and our founder and LP net promoter score is 100%. As a VC friend recently told me, “everyone looks smart in a bull market”, but we are proud of the portfolio that we have built and have the confidence that now is the time to scale up our firm.

New Partner

I’m excited to announce that Thomas Otter will be joining our firm this quarter. Thomas has been an extension to our fund as a limited partner and we have been working more closely in the past few months to AB test a new partnership model. This is a huge addition for our firm and allows us greater focus as a global firm. Thomas is based in Germany and gives us broader exposure to the global startup market. I’ve personally known Thomas for over 15 years and have been recruiting him even before launching the firm in 2019. Thomas’s background includes leading product management for SAP SuccessFactors during their post-acquisition hypergrowth phase. He has been a very active limited partner and has been developing his investment chops as a public board member, a “unicorn” advisor, and an angel investor over the last 3 years. In addition to Thomas, we are expanding our team including our operator network and back office support so we as investors can spend our time finding the next great company.

New Opportunity

Our future is almost best summarized in Larry Fink’s Letter to CEOs published a few weeks ago…

The future of work is currently being re-written. We intend to have a big impact on rewiring work by investing in founders that are creating the future now. Based on the success of our first fund, and our growing reputation of go-to investors for founders, we are excited about substantially increasing our capital commitments (more on that soon😀) and doubling down on our strategy. We see a huge global opportunity and have begun building out our platform that will provide greater resources and support to help our founders move faster. Even with all of the uncertainty in the world, I’m excited about our future to support founders anywhere in the world.