Announcing Ridge Ventures

Ridge Ventures is the new name for IDG Ventures USA. It’s a new brand for an established team that has been competing and winning in early-stage venture capital for the last decade. We — Alex Rosen, Phil Sanderson, Pat Kenealy and Gil Penchina — have been investing together for years, but felt the time was right for a new stand-alone brand inspired by the daring journeys we share with the founding teams we back. Our fund evolved out of a prior single-LP fund started by IDG, a leading B2B technology media company. IDG was one of several large investors in our fund and provided marketing services to our portfolio companies. Since 2007, we have had the opportunity to work with an incredible group of portfolio companies and hundreds of dedicated entrepreneurs, and we have built a powerful network of Fortune 500 CXOs who help our portfolio companies understand enterprise needs. We also added new limited partners and sharpened our focus. The hallmarks of our style are speed of decisions, flexibility of our terms, focus on supporting founders, and passion for the classic early stage investing. This approach helped us partner with successful founders of Krux (acquired by Salesforce), Funzio (acquired by GREE), MindMeld (acquired by Cisco), and Vidible (acquired by AOL). Some of our current standout investments include Appboy, Discord, Fastly, Minted, Next Games, Sapho, SafeGraph, Smartling, Soothe, Telltale Games, ThirdLove, and Trifacta. We are proud to have backed great founders of these and many other companies.

Today, in order to better reflect our investment focus and long-term independent status, we are changing the firm’s name to Ridge Ventures.

Climbing ridges is a perfect metaphor for a founder’s experience. For most founders, building a startup feels like a climb to the top, with peaks and valleys along the way. Ridges also surround us in the Bay Area where we spend time with partners, colleagues, friends and family.

Ridge Ventures believes venture capitalists should be fast, flexible and founder-focused. Our unique strengths as a venture fund are our dedication to the early stage of a company’s life, understanding ongoing software revolution, and helping our founders as they begin scaling their businesses.

We look forward to our next journey. To learn about where we are heading visit our new site at www.ridge.vc.

Alex, Gil, Pat, and Phil