From Day One to Global Scale
Less than two years ago, we introduced SignalFire, our first $50M seed fund, and our mission to solve the hardest parts of building a startup: recruiting exceptional talent, receiving world-class advice, and gaining high-level access to key relationships. Our fund may have been small, but our ambitions were not — and we have worked tirelessly to deliver unprecedented levels of support for founders at the seed stage.
Our DNA is based in technology and product — just like the companies we invest in — so our approach to venture capital is fundamentally different from a traditional firm. SignalFire is built end-to-end on a real-time data platform that serves our founders directly, delivering market intelligence and finding the exceptional talent they need to invent the future. But data is only part of the story: our founders also access a deep network of Advisors invested in their success and receive support from a cross-functional team day in and day out.
We’ve had the privilege to support innovative founders in the early phases of their journeys: we’ve helped recruit dozens of engineers and executives to our companies, helped them forge partnerships, and introduced key customers. Our Advisors, with experience running the world’s most iconic technology companies, have armed our founders with the best guidance at the right moment, whether the topic was enterprise pricing, system architecture, or go-to-market strategy. From day one, we’ve been determined to continue this support as our companies grow, scaling with them as our founders pursue their global ambitions.
Phase II (and Fund II)
Today, we’re pleased to announce the next phase of our mission with an expanded team and a pair of funds totaling $330M.
With SignalFire Fund II, we will redouble our focus on seed-stage investing with $165M in capital, adding the capability to lead small Series A rounds.
With our new $165M Breakout Fund, we now have the financial resources to invest up to $15M+ in companies that are “breaking out”, ready to accelerate and expand their market-leading positions.
With the new funds, we have added new investment partners with extensive experience building franchise companies. Leading the Breakout Fund, Tony Huie brings lessons learned from scaling Dropbox, where he was an early executive and helped the company scale from a 50 person startup to a global company with 1500+ employees and offices around the world. Walter Kortschak, formerly a Managing Partner of the leading growth equity firm Summit Partners and a 30-year veteran of the venture and private equity industry, has transitioned from Advisor to Executive Chairman and brings a wealth of experience guiding dozens of companies to the public markets.
Thought Leadership
We believe in being true thought partners for our entrepreneurs — not following the crowd or giving general advice, but completing our own primary research into emerging technology markets; leveraging our proprietary data, and extensive corporate network, and Advisor relationships. Laurent Parmentier has joined the firm to lead our research efforts drawing on his diverse experience in an array of industries developed during his years at BCG.
But we know that we’re not the only partner that founders need. The range of decisions, skills, and advice that founders need is truly immense — far larger than any single VC could provide. We’ve built SignalFire to support founders through this journey by pre-wiring a network of invested Advisors: entrepreneurs who have founded, scaled and led iconic companies, who now provide tactical and strategic advice on-demand in the area founders need it most. We’ve been fortunate to work for years with incredible experts in product and engineering functions, and with Fund II, we have brought onboard more Advisors serving scaling pain points like sales and marketing, corporate development, and internationalization.
Expanding the Platform
Over the last two years, we doubled every resource we provide to our portfolio, carefully monitoring our dashboards to see where we’re moving the needle for our founders. With our new funds, we plan to double it again. Our team of 20, half of whom are engineers and product strategists, spend every day improving our platform to make SignalFire the first venture capital firm that scales seamlessly with its entrepreneurs.
We have always believed that talent is the lifeblood of any great technology company, so we’ve architected our firm to support our founders in building amazing teams. We’ve built a proprietary recruiting platform that tracks and ranks the world’s top engineers and designed it to scale, whether they’re looking for the early foundational technical team or building a globally distributed engineering organization. We pair that platform with one of the top talent partners in Silicon Valley, Mike Mangini, who previously led strategic executive and engineering recruiting initiatives for Facebook. Together with our recruiting platform, Mike directly empowers our companies with the best available data and insights on engineers around the world.
We have also built out our networking and education programs to include monthly dinners with Advisors (Founder Firesides), collaboration sessions with early adopters (Corporate Spark Sessions) and tactical training sessions (Acceleration Resources). We’re proud to see the results in our strong partnerships with founders as they execute on their visions.
The Next Chapter
We are truly honored by all the entrepreneurs that have chosen us as a partner on their journey, and grateful to the advisors, partners, friends and family that have supported us along the way. We couldn’t be more excited for the next chapter, building the first scalable venture capital firm that brings exceptional talent, advice, and access for bold founders.
