Announcing LH Fund IX

By Ben Lerer, Eric Hippeau, and Graham Brown, Managing Partners

Today, we announced LH Fund IX, a $200M fund exclusively focused on the early stage. With this fund, we’ll continue to invest in the best pre-seed and seed companies we can find — with the talent-driven and generalist investment approach we’ve always taken.

This raise also marks 15 years since we started Lerer Hippeau. In 2010, New York’s tech ecosystem bore almost no resemblance to how it looks today. And that’s not surprising — over this period, we’ve observed the rise and pervasiveness of smartphones and cloud computing, experienced a complete reorientation of society around tech and social media, lived through a pandemic, seen extreme scaling in the venture market, endured global geopolitical upheaval, and, over the last few years, been delighted and disarmed by another large-scale sea change with developments in AI. VC was a cottage industry in New York when we were getting started — now, it’s a mainstream asset class.

We feel lucky and humbled when we think back to our origin story — a major case of “right place, right time.” We started the primitive version of Lerer Hippeau because we were founders in a city that didn’t have all that many of us building, so everybody knew everybody, and we were all figuring it out together in an amazingly collaborative way. We didn’t slot into a fully formed ecosystem. We just felt in our bones that New York would and should become a major tech hub — and why shouldn’t it be? New York’s always led industries of all sorts. New York’s always attracted truly exceptional talent. It’s New York.

We started by writing very small checks to back our friends and colleagues doing interesting things. A lot of those early businesses were in consumer and media, given New York’s roots and ours. But we were always focused on meeting the best people we could and backing them agnostic of what they were building, as long as we thought they were tackling a market that could become big and in which they had some unique insight and a right to win. Because we were early arrivals to the market, we were able to carve out space for ourselves as generalists. New entrants to our market today don’t necessarily have that luxury, and we think it’s a major advantage for us going forward. (See: David Epstein’s Range — we’re biased, of course, but we think he’s spot on in describing the generalist advantage.)

So the “thesis” was as such: back exceptional people improving rapidly changing industries, and do it principally in New York on the belief that the city will serve as an increasingly interesting place to live and grow generationally important businesses.

Lucky for us, that’s all generally proven to be true, though the industry has changed materially. We’ve adapted with our surroundings: as the industry has gotten over-crowded and hypercompetitive, we’ve continued to invest in improving ourselves and our team to meet the moment; each fund we’ve raised has been larger than its predecessor, but we’ve been incredibly deliberate to shape our strategy and fund size to best align with founders.

We’ve also broadened and deepened our areas of investment focus as the New York market has matured and diversified. Over the years, we’ve backed companies building in robotics, infrastructure, healthcare, crypto, logistics, fintech, commerce, devops, climate, cybersecurity, gaming, CPG, biotech, and so much more. We’ve always believed that great founders identify great opportunities and markets earlier than investors do — and so we’ve never been bashful to say that following the lead of talented founders has been a winning strategy for us. This era will be no different.

Our job is a lot harder than it used to be, but we’re also better at it. Our pattern recognition has improved materially — we’re more confidently identifying the situations where talent and markets line up to create magic. And of course, that’s the business at our stage. We’re not making bets for today or tomorrow — we’re trying to imagine a world that’s as different from today’s as today is from 2010’s — pre-pandemic, pre-AI, pre-cloud, pre-mobile.

We know we’ve learned a lot in the last 15 years, and we fully expect to be shaking our heads in 2040 at all that we didn’t know today. The pace of progress ensures that being in the predictions business will remain difficult. But we feel so lucky to be doing this work and feel really honored that founders continue to want to choose us as their partners. We’re also deeply appreciative of our LPs’ continued support, and especially proud to count dozens of our portfolio founders among them. We love the fact that many of our founders invest in our funds because it’s one of the best data points we have to exemplify what this community means to the people who comprise it.

We have full conviction about why we exist in this ecosystem: to serve as a founder’s first and most aligned institutional partner. It’s what we’ve always done, and what we’ll continue to do with LH Fund IX. If you’re building something, we want to meet you.