New Capital, Same Values: Introducing Fika’s $160M Fund IV, a Continuation of our Tireless and Collaborative Commitment to Founders

Tianxiang Zhuo
Fika Ventures
Published in
5 min readSep 11, 2024

Today, we are excited to announce that we have closed $160 million for Fika Ventures Fund IV, bringing our total capital raised to more than half a billion dollars. While we were extremely privileged to be oversubscribed in this environment, we very intentionally kept its size the same as Fund III.

While other funds have changed their mandates significantly over time, keeping the fund size consistent was critical to maintaining our disciplined investing approach, our commitment to our team culture and values, and our incentive alignment with the early-stage founders we work with.

As we embark on the next chapter, we want to take a moment to reflect on what matters most to us at Fika (hint: it’s not funding announcements). For us, it’s all about the relationships we build with the extraordinary entrepreneurs we back. We invest with conviction and follow through with tireless support, then let our founders and the work we do on their behalf speak for itself.

Since Fika Ventures was founded in 2016, our approach has been rooted in the belief that venture capital is fundamentally a people business. We take inspiration from the hospitality industry, which means we treat people with respect, check egos at the door, and obsess over the customer (in our case, founder) experience. Our dedication to these values are so core to our philosophy that we’ve dedicated a page on our newly revamped website to it. These 10 core values drive all of the work we do at Fika and the way we approach the founders we partner with.

More Than Just Investors

At Fika, we aren’t just investors — we are true partners to our founders in every sense of the word. This means operating on founders’ hours rather than our own. We want to be the first call our founders make when they need advice, a sounding board, or just someone to celebrate a win or commiserate a loss with. We serve as a natural extension of our portfolio companies’ management teams and work side-by-side — not across the table from — founders on every aspect of building an enduring business.

As former operators, investors, and entrepreneurs who have founded, scaled, and exited companies ourselves, our lived operational experience allows us to understand the journey firsthand and provide uniquely high-touch support across a wide range of areas.

No issue is too small, or area too big, for us to tackle with (or on behalf of) our founders, and we excel at helping with critical needs like recruiting top talent, closing transformative deals, and raising downstream capital. We don’t believe the best way to do this is by getting bigger and bigger ourselves, but rather to balance time and bandwidth across our small but mighty team. This way, each founder works closely with the whole Fika team and benefits from all the accumulated experience, energy, and relationships.

We do life, not just business, with our founders. We believe the relationships we build at this early-seed stage transcend any financial transaction which is why founders have come back to work with us for their second and third companies.

Staying Focused in a Changing Landscape

Now that we are three funds in, we’ve witnessed multiple hype cycles that could have easily distracted us, whether it’s riding the crypto boom or raising massive opportunity funds. But with Fund IV, we intend to continue to do what we have done best — leading pre-seed and seed rounds in B2B technology companies across sectors like vertical SaaS, fintech, AI, commerce enablement, healthcare, and marketplaces.

In a world where larger funds often come at the expense of true partnership, we believe this focused approach is more important than ever. It means that every check we write is meaningful relative to the size of our fund and we aren’t just placing call options. Our incentives are aligned to work closely and tirelessly with our founders because, in the early days of company building, the lines between success and failure can be blurry — but we will walk them together.

Evolving Our Team to Better Serve Founders

As we kick off Fund IV, we are also thrilled to share that our team is evolving and growing. We are excited to welcome back a familiar face: Arteen Arabshahi, who rejoins Fika as a General Partner after an impactful tenure on the executive team at Route. Many of you know Arteen from his early work with BuiltinLA and Fika Fund I, but he left to build a deeper set of operating experiences and returns to us with a new wealth of knowledge and experience from Route, whom he helped grow to over $100M in revenue and $250M in capital raised in under four years.

Arteen’s operating and investing expertise will have him leading our investments in marketplaces and in areas including supply chain, logistics, and commerce enablement. Together with TX Zhuo and John Chen as General Partners and Matt Hersh as Operating Partner, the senior leadership team at Fika has worked together for over a decade in multiple capacities.

We’d also like to announce two well-deserved senior promotions at Fika Ventures. Natalie Paz has been promoted to CFO and Gabriella Brignardello has been promoted to Principal. Both Nat and Gabriella have been long-term, instrumental members at Fika and we’re thrilled for their continued impact and growth here.

These changes and additions add strength to our ability to support founders across the key functions of early-stage company building, from product strategy and go-to-market to team building and financial operations. But most importantly, this team embodies the disciplined, tireless Fika approach to investing and working with founders. Coming mostly from underrepresented backgrounds, the Fika team brings an underdog mentality — a combination of grit, resilience, and determination — to everything we do.

We all recognize the immense privilege it is to do the job we do, and we do it with both pride and an awareness of our responsibility to be the best partners we can be.

The Road Ahead

As we look to the future, we could not be more excited about the opportunities ahead of us. Many of the themes we are investing in today are new flavors of the themes we’ve invested in from the beginning. We started the fund with a data-first mindset, and that same data is what powers today’s AI-revolution. The pace of innovation in technology is accelerating, and we believe the next decade will give rise to a new generation of category-defining companies that will fundamentally reshape industries that we hope to be a part of.

If you are an entrepreneur tackling a meaningful problem in the B2B ecosystem, we want to hear from you. At Fika, we don’t just invest in companies — we invest in people and the relationships we build together.

To our founders, LPs, and the entire Fika community: Thank you for your trust and partnership. We can’t wait to see what we will build together.

Team Fika,

TX, Arteen, John, Matt, Aaron, Tracy, Gabriella, Natalie, JD, James and Olivia

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Fika Ventures
Fika Ventures

Published in Fika Ventures

Fika Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on B2B software startups, with an emphasis on pre-Series A companies. Our expertise spans vertical SaaS, fintech, commerce enablement, healthcare, and marketplaces, particularly those harnessing AI to drive innovation.

Tianxiang Zhuo
Tianxiang Zhuo

Written by Tianxiang Zhuo

General Partner, Fika Ventures. Previously: GP @ Karlin Ventures, McKinsey & Co, Tech Entrepreneur, Stanford MBA.

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