Our 150M+ Fund II for Enterprise Tech and Industrial Startups in US and Japan

We are excited to announce our second fund, Draper Nexus II, for early and select growth stage startups.

We were fortunate to have a few success stories in our first fund — Shift (Tokyo Stock Exchange: 3697), Liveramp (Acxiom), Klout (Lithium Technologies), Swell (Apple), and Kauli (Voyage Group, Japan).

Along the way, we learned two key lessons on why certain entrepreneurs like working with us.

We enable enterprise customers through our network and deep market understanding.

We don’t just pay lip service to being value-added investors. We bring to bear our strong network of C-level personnel at large Japanese conglomerates. By being investors in our fund, these conglomerates are also committed to the success of startups we invest in.

We are a financial VC backed by Japanese corporates combining the best of traditional and corporate venture capital worlds. This provides two key advantages to startups working with us:

a. Enterprise pilots/market validation for early startups and market expansion/channel partnerships in Japan and broader Asia for later stage startups.

b. A thorough understanding of critical market needs across several verticals. That means our due-diligence is not predicated on google searches and soothsaying. Even if we don’t end up investing in a startup, founders find our analysis of the challenges in the market very useful.

We don’t pretend to be operators.

While we have all worked at startups before, we haven’t seen the world through a founder’s eyes. Realizing the value of that perspective, we have serial entrepreneurs (in whom we have invested at least once) as part of our team. We are quite lucky to have the likes of Auren Hoffmann (Live Ramp, Bright Roll, Bridge Path, Kyber Systems), David Pearce (NuvoSun, MiaSole, OptCom, SciVac), Wasiq Bokhari (QBotix, Bioident Technologies, Kalinex, Clickmarks), Salil Pradhan (Hewlett Packard RFID Program, VCnity, Tendril) and Masaru Tange (Shift, Incs Inc IT Consulting Group) as venture advisers/partners at Draper Nexus.

We don’t dabble in useless advice, a commodity in Silicon Valley. As a team, we provide valuable perspectives that’s grounded in market reality and startup building experience.

Draper Nexus Fund II kick starts with Drones, Machine Learning, and Enterprise tech.

We started off the second fund with investments in CyPhy Works (drone startup that can provide unlimited flying time and secure high bandwidth communications), Ayasdi (machine intelligence startup using topological analysis to extract meaning from complex data sets), Team Spirit (workforce management SaaS that won the Salesforce best OEM partner award in 2014), Xica (marketing and sales analytics SaaS) and From Scratch (digital marketing platform). We recently described our investment in CyPhy Works in detail and will soon publish similar articles for our other investments.

And thus it begins again. Our doors are officially open for crazy ideas and crazier entrepreneurs.

Image Credit: Eric Haidara on Stocksnap