Announcing Ridge Ventures’ Fourth Fund
I’m thrilled to announce the close of our latest fund, Ridge Ventures IV. This fund is our first fully independent one since rebranding from IDG Ventures last year, and our largest yet. It was oversubscribed with over $130M in closed commitments from a great group of LPs, including foundations, endowments, insurance companies, funds of funds, family offices, Ridge portfolio entrepreneurs, and prominent tech industry executives from companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Oracle, and Salesforce.
We raised twice as much capital from outside investors as we have for any fund in the past. And we’re extremely grateful to our returning institutional LPs, all of whom re-upped with us after participating in our third fund. We believe that serves as the best testament to the returns we’ve provided.
Success always starts with the team. Ours is small yet ethnically, educationally, and experientially diverse. We hope to continue increasing the diversity of our team in the years to come. The five of us on the investment team were born in three different countries and went to four different universities while the fifth skipped college. Sometimes we joke that our only overlap has been coding in C++.
As we learn from successes and mistakes alike, we continue to refine our approach. Today we follow our own investment formula: a founder-focused approach backing experienced entrepreneurs who are building enterprise companies at the traditional Series A stage (the first few customers, not millions in ARR). We are aligned with entrepreneurs — dedicated to the teams, the opportunity, and what we can do to help — while stressing less about ownership, founder control, and revenue traction at the early stages.
We operate two invitation-only advisory boards, one for CIOs and another for CMOs. These groups are very engaged, meeting four times a year and providing existing and potential Ridge CEOs direct access to 75 Fortune 500 CXOs, who offer insights into enterprise pain points and early product direction. These senior individuals often become internal champions for large-scale enterprise deployments.
Lastly, we have a thesis that we’re continuing to drill down on: enterprise data and code that radically change the end-user experience will create the most value. Going deeper, we see three major trends changing the enterprise landscape: (1) a second wave of migration to the modern cloud, (2) the emergence of data-driven and data-as-a-service (DaaS) companies, and (3) the evolving world of human/machine interaction.
With this proven methodology, we’ll stay focused on enterprise and infrastructure solutions empowering large companies to offer the best user experience to their customers and employees. This is where we see the largest gap between the potential impact of technology and its adoption. We’ll also invest in select opportunities in consumer applications which inform and reinforce our enterprise thesis. Enterprise solutions often lag behind consumer applications due to more complex requirements and a challenging — but ultimately more sustainable — path to massive scale. Areas we remain excited about involve AI, analytics/data, SaaS, and infrastructure, in industries where we continue to see large, addressable, unsolved problems, including martech, supply chain, and HR tech.
Our enterprise portfolio companies that have focused on end-customer user experience are consistently proving to be market leaders. We see it with Fastly, which is delivering the speedy experience today’s global consumers expect (all while significantly increasing engagement for media and e-commerce companies). We also see it with Discord, which we funded at its seed stage when the founders were rethinking how gamers could best communicate (and now hosts 135 million users). And, we saw it with MindMeld, which started tackling AI-powered conversational interfaces back in 2011 when the world was just starting to learn how to spell Hadoop.
We consider it a privilege to have spent the past decade working with entrepreneurs creating the future — dedicating their lives to companies founded on a sliver of proof and a healthy dose of vision. From our journey with Tom Chavez and Krux, which brought smarter content and marketing experiences to users (acquired by Salesforce for $800M), to our early investment in Mariam Naficy and Minted in 2007, when we were convinced Mariam could deliver on her vision around the power of creative communities. We smile at every holiday card we receive that showcases Minted’s logo on the back.
This latest fund will allow us to continue working with entrepreneurs that can see around the corner way before the rest of the world can, and we look forward to funding and partnering with them knowing our lives change, radically and positively, in the process.
- Alex
