Founders deserve more than “warm introductions” from their VCs
Pruven raises $378M Fund II with 10 Financial Services and Insurance giants to hand-deliver growth to startups
Today we are excited to announce the launch of Pruven Capital’s oversubscribed $378 million Fund II, which is designed to help leading founders scale their companies from Inception to Iconic. We do this by driving commercial outcomes for our startups with our ten Limited Partners, who are all global financial services leaders.
Why raise this fund?
With over $300 billion in venture capital currently sitting on the sidelines, you might wonder why the world needs another venture fund. We raised this fund to force a choice instead of a comparison for founders: do you, as a founder, want talk or do you want traction? While many VC firms promise growth support, few deliver real commercial outcomes. We built Pruven from the ground up to change that.
We’re focused on delivering growth because we firmly believe it remains the evergreen challenge for startups and the single greatest source of breakaway value creation. As the old adage goes, “First-time founders are obsessed with product; second time founders are obsessed with distribution.”
A critical difference in our model is that the investors in our Fund (aka Limited Partners, LPs) are exclusively large, industry-leading companies who span the end-to-end value chain in the Insurance, Asset Management and Financial Services sectors. They include Prudential Financial, PGIM, Lincoln Financial, TIAA, Nuveen, Willis Towers Watson, Mutual of Omaha, Nippon Life, Nissay, and Generali. These corporations collectively spend ~$15B on Enterprise IT annually, have ~$5T in assets under management (including over $800B in real estate assets), and over $12T of in-force insurance premiums. We humbly believe we offer an unparalleled go-to-market platform, built on deep connectivity with our LPs, to help founders win marquee reference clients and grow rapidly.
That said, we’re far from the only VC that’s funded by large institutions, or who promise “warm introductions” to LPs. We work far beyond that:
• Deep access and executive commitment: We maintain regular engagement with key businesses and functions of our LPs, aligning on budget priorities, roadmaps, and needs to ensure swift commercial decision-making
• Holistic support for onboarding: We build connectivity with the procurement, finance, legal and other functions of our LPs to facilitate commercial deals
• Dedicated resources on Pruven team: We have dedicated partner-level resources to quarterbacking our relationships with our corporate partners and helping startups navigate selling to them
And finally, this is not just a vision — we have a proven track record of delivering commercial outcomes: over 2/3rd of the companies we have invested in to date have secured a POC, pilot and / or a scaled commercial deal with our corporate partners.
Our model in action: Helping Pismo reach escape velocity
Pismo is a next-gen banking & payments-as-a-service system, built natively in the cloud. Our domain depth in financial services and prior investment experience with Square helped us see the potential in what founders Ricardo Josua and Daniela Binatti were building: a full-stack solution that was programmable and had built-in intelligence. We also knew that a unit within our LP, Prudential of Brazil, was looking to incorporate incentive design and admin logic directly into a payments / settlements solution for its captive distribution force.
Over several carefully orchestrated meetings, we connected Prudential of Brazil’s CTO with the Pismo team. This led to Pismo exploring the opportunity in an entirely new vertical of insurance payments. In addition, we were also able to assist Pismo with a large commercial deal at one of the largest global banks. Several months later, Visa swooped in and acquired Pismo for $1 billion in November 2023.
Why now?
Our model is more important now than ever — because today growth is unfortunately harder to come by.
Four years ago, the meteoric rise in both deal volume and size created an environment where venture-backed companies could spend at unsustainable levels for customer acquisition (and, to a lesser extent, cross-adoption of other start-up solutions). Today, we see growth slowing for startups:
The data is similar for earlier- and later-stage startups as well. Higher interest rates and jitters about the strength of the global economy have increased scrutiny for the true value new solutions can deliver, particularly among enterprise buyers. We see many POCs and pilots; far fewer at-scale commercial contracts. In this environment, founders need a different kind of growth partner.
Why us?
We built Pruven based on our years of learning at firms like Battery Ventures, a16z, Madrona, Fintech Collective and Citi Ventures, as well as our own experiences as founders and startup growth leaders.
We’ve seen firsthand the power and traction that a lighthouse enterprise customer can create for an early-stage startup. We know the incredible value we can help create based on our track record of enabling critical commercial relationships for our portfolio companies — Docusign, Bilt Rewards, Square, Plaid and many more. Our years of experience have yielded a commercialization playbook that’s proven and repeatable.
We are also the only VC firm that has built an LP network of global scale in Financial Services and Insurance. We believe founders need privileged access to a scaled network of incumbents to achieve breakout growth.
Finally, what sets us apart is our “independent yet integrated” model, which enables us to provide our startups with strong growth support and privileged access to our LPs:
• We are an independent, returns-driven venture capital firm with complete autonomy over the investments we choose to make
• However, we work tirelessly to stay close to our LPs’ needs and priorities so we can identify the right opportunities and solutions
• We create this integration at multiple levels: from strong relationships with the C-level leaders down through their individual business lines and corporate functions like procurement and legal
What do we focus on?
While we believe in the value of our domain expertise and experience, we are NOT an InsurTech or FinTech fund. We invest in those verticals as well as in Healthtech, Real Estate / PropTech, and horizontally in Enterprise Infrastructure and B2B software. These focus areas are simply outcomes of where we believe we can differentially help startups grow.
We are also multi-stage (from Seed through Series C), flexing our check sizes and entry points to meet the needs of our founders. We believe limiting ourselves to a single vertical or stage is simply too limiting, for ourselves and our investors.
Calling all founders who are ready to make a different choice.
If you are a founder, tackling a problem that would be relevant to enterprise customers, please reach out. We’re ready to show you the difference we can deliver in achieving breakthrough growth.
