Announcing $260M in new capital with Cowboy Fund IV & Mustang I, Yeehaw!
By Team Cowboy (Aileen, Robby, Jillian, Ted, Allegra, Matt, & Mae)
At Cowboy Ventures, our mission is to back the most promising seed stage companies, while having a positive impact on the communities around us. As we celebrate our 10th year, we’re thrilled to announce $260M raised for two new funds: Cowboy Fund IV, a $140M seed fund, and our first “Mustang Fund”, a $120M fund for investing in breakout Cowboy portfolio companies.
We’ll have the same focus for Cowboy IV and Mustang as our prior decade. Take a curated, thoughtful approach to finding and partnering with outstanding seed-stage companies. Take care to be a full-stack partner to help de-risk and accelerate early-stage company journeys in a bespoke way. A bit more about what’s ahead with our new funds:
Where we’re excited to invest
We’ll continue to invest in a mix of US-based enterprise and consumer-focused startups in categories like vertical SaaS, enterprise infrastructure, developer tools, big data, security, fintech of all kinds, AI-driven software, and new consumer opportunities. Healthcare is also a growing area of investment for us at Cowboy.
We’ll continue to invest in founders who have a unique insight into solving an important business problem in a potentially large and growing market ($Bns). Their product may replace incumbent software, or replace an existing business process with a measurably better, tech-driven solution (like at Dollar Shave Club, Drata, Hone, or Vic.AI). We also get excited to back founders with a vision that will help create a whole new category (like at Guild Education, Lightstep, Mutiny, Tally or Uno).
Our team has built a specialty partnering at the “pre-product” stage (~70% of our prior investments) with many founders coming to us with design mock-ups and sketches before any code has been written. We’re excited to keep investing this early.
We hope to build on our track record of being super valuable partners to both seasoned, ‘pedigreed’ founders as well as first time founders from non-traditional backgrounds. And, for being among the best partners for historically underrepresented founders.
Starting at seed, continuing through scale
Cowboy is purpose-built for working with founders at seed. We’ve got tons of passion for helping founders at a super early stage to add the right talent, build great software, get customer adoption, and build the kind of company discerning follow-on investors get excited about.
Our specialist + generalist team offers domain-specific, purpose-built networks and expertise (like in enterprise infra and fintech), as well as general help in a variety of ways.
We take a team-based approach, so founders get personalized, bespoke help that leverages all of Team Cowboy plus benefits from a curated Cowboy community of founders and world-class operators. How we help includes sleeves-rolled-up strategizing, helping make smart trade-offs, recruiting with a high bar, seeing around corners and helping avoid pitfalls, opening lots of doors, financial planning, story telling, fund raising, coaching, making high value introductions, helping build diverse teams with resilient cultures, and lots of active listening. We’ve helped build leading companies through many cycles, and are excited to work to earn our reputation for providing uniquely honest, empathetic, wise, and impactful support to leaders through highs and lows.
We have built extensive relationships across the venture ecosystem. Many of our most promising portfolio companies were referred to us by founders, angels or other firms (thank you)! We’ve led and co-led seed rounds in working with a diversity of complementary venture firms and strategic angels, and take care to curate valuable co-investors for every financing round.
We’re also proud of our ‘graduation rate’ of Cowboy-backed seed stage companies ~90% of the companies we’ve backed have raised Series A from fantastic venture firms.
What’s next?
We’ve worked closely with 100+ amazing early-stage startups over the past 10 years. What they all have in common are unique insights about a large opportunity, a mission to deliver groundbreaking tech-driven products customers love, an obsession with learning and improving, and a desire to build one of the world’s best places to work.
The economic climate of the next few years is going to be tough. Having helped many companies navigate prior cycles, we are excited to help teams navigate these turbulent times. Downturns have a history of breeding incredible innovation and positioning companies to become industry leaders. We’re excited to partner with Cowboy portfolio companies, and to back the next generation of seed-stage startups in the coming years.
If you’re working on an idea that sounds like it will be a fit for what you’ve read here, we’d love to meet you — please come check out our new website at Cowboy.vc and get in touch.
Happy Year of the Rabbit!
- Team Cowboy
