Jun 1, 2022
boldstart vi + opportunities iii, $367M to back dev first, crypto infra & SaaS founders from Day One 🌴
We’re thrilled to announce boldstart vi + opportunities iii, $367M to continue backing developer first, crypto infra, and SaaS founders from day one to scale. boldstart vi is $192,168,111 while opportunities iii is $175M. Being a day one investor takes time and patience, and we are 🔥 up to have the flexibility to not only write first checks as little as $250K, but to also continue backing our founders with investments up to $30M as they scale. 🙏🏼 to our founders, LPs, co-investors and friends as we would not be here without your partnership.
This is a short post as not much has changed. Bigger is not better. Despite the supersizing of seed funds, staying disciplined on our core fund size and ratio of investable $ per partner will enable us to continue to support the best technical founders from day one and not stray from our mission. We purposely kept fund vi at $192,168,111, approximately a 20% increase from fund v, while adding more firepower to the team (see below). opportunities iii is $175M and more than double opportunities ii as we have more fast growing portfolio companies to support.
With boldstart vi, we will continue to:
- 🤝 collaborate with technical founders well before writing their first line of code or making their first hires
- 💸 lead pre-product rounds at company formation
- 🏎 help accelerate their path to product market fit.
- ☎️ strive to be a founder’s first call, text, whatsapp, telegram from day one to exit
- 💡 partner with underdog founders who can see around corners and create new categories — building the next Snyk, Blockdaemon, BigID, Kustomer, Superhuman and more.
Promotions to Partner, growing the team
We’re 🔥 up to announce that we have promoted Shomik Ghosh from Principal to Partner and Ellen Chisa from Founder-in-Residence to Partner. Eliot and I couldn’t be more excited to expand our partnership from 2 to 4 as both Ellen and Shomik not only embody what it means to truly serve founders 24/7 but have also led some amazing investments in the latest funds.
Since our last fund announcement, we’ve also added Ab Gupta from portfolio company Kustomer (sold to Meta) as an Operating Partner and Ernest Addison as an Associate. Natalie Ledbetter, our Head of People/Operating Partner, continues to make a huge impact on the portfolio helping founders build their hiring and people function. Day one investing is a team sport, and we’re excited to continue expanding our team to help founders set the right foundation from day one.
+Crypto Infra
Our roots as a firm come from investing in highly technical teams building all kinds of infrastructure including decentralized. We made our first crypto infrastructure investment over 8 years ago in 2014 in Changetip, payment rails to easily send Bitcoin on a peer to peer basis. We were way too early but learned a ton through that process.
This led us to starting the world’s first enterprise-focused blockchain lab in 2017 with IBM Hyperledger and Comcast as our partners and Rob Bailey as co-founder. Through MState (portfolio here), and in collaboration with boldstart III, we led day one investments in Blockdaemon and serve on the board of directors and also participated in the founding seed rounds of Fireblocks and Amberdata amongst others. Since Fund IV in 2018, we’ve also had a carveout to allow us to invest in tokens.
Over the last 18 months, we’ve continued to back existing portfolio companies like Blockdaemon, a leading node infra provider, as it scaled to a $3.25B valuation, Upstream (no-code DAO in a box), and Amberdata (digital asset data infrastructure). We’ve also made new announced investments in Stakewise (liquid staking protocol with institutional focus) and unannounced ones in defi security and crypto treasury management.
Given our day one focus, we go where the founders go, and as of late and despite the turbulent markets, we’ve seen an equal number of talented founders building new enterprise infra as well as crypto infra companies. The opportunities are endless, and we look forward to continue partnering with founders building core infrastructure to scale, secure, and invest in digital assets while also making it easier for developers to build new applications.
Fully distributed, NYC, LA, Boston + 👋🏼 Miami 🌴
We’re now fully distributed as Eliot and I both moved to Miami at the beginning of 2022, and the rest of our team is covering key locations like NYC, Boston, and LA. Great developer first companies are built anywhere so we will continue backing founders in Israel, Europe, and the US no matter our locale. As for why Miami, take a look at Ed’s post from his weekly What’s 🔥. Suffice to say, we like catching 🌊 early and are super excited to help build and expand the burgeoning enterprise and crypto infrastructure community.
Let’s Build 🏗️
boldstart is open for business, and we’ll continue to look for the best and brightest technical founders creating new categories in enterprise and crypto infrastructure. Please reach out if you have an idea💡 and are ready to build 🏗️!
More on TechCrunch -”boldstart ventures has two new funds to plug into teams with an idea and little else “
