VU Launches Bonded — VU’s Affinity Investor Network

With Bonded angel investors and family offices can invest on a deal-by deal basis and personalize the type of investments they want to invest in across VC Verticals, PE Sectors, Geography, Diversity/Impact, and University/MBA programs. Sign up for Bonded.

Bonded: Bonded is a new branded investor platform for VU’s investor syndicate and has grown to 3,000+ investors. Investors that join Bonded can select to invest based on their interests in VC verticals (Consumer, Enterprise, FinTech, Frontier, Healthcare, PropTech, & Web3), PE sectors (real estate, growth equity, leveraged buyouts, Pre-IPO, and PIPEs), by geography (US/Canada, LatAm, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa), by diversity/impact (Female Founders, Black Founders, Latinx Founders, LGBTQ+ Founders, and ESG/Impact), and by University/MBA program (Harvard/HBS, Stanford/GSB, UPenn/Wharton, MIT/Sloan, etc.).

Investors can invest a minimum of $5K per deal and investors will only receive opportunities that have passed VU’s investment committee and which VU’s fund is also participating in, in order to maintain a high quality level of deal flow that investors will receive. After signing up for Bonded, investors will begin to receive emails about co-investment opportunities based on their selected interests and will be invited to investor calls where VU’s investment team presents the thesis for each investment opportunity.

VU’s Investor Platform: VU has built an investment platform which includes: VU Venture Partners (a global venture capital fund), VU Capital Partners (a global private equity fund), Bonded (VU’s Investor Syndicate), Venture University (the world’s leading VC/PE investor accelerator), and Finally (a fund admin platform for creating and managing SPVs/Funds).

VU Venture Partners: VU Venture Partners is a global venture capital fund, focusing on pre-seed to early growth-stage companies across Consumer, Enterprise, Fintech, Frontier, Healthcare, Proptech, and Web3. VU has developed an innovative model for the venture capital industry, which has scaled its investment team to 70+ investors globally with HQ offices in San Francisco, Austin, and Hong Kong, and investors located across the U.S., Canada, LatAm, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, & Africa. VU’s model also provides a number of unfair and sustainable competitive advantages to outperform for its investors, which is supported by its proven track record since 2018, growing to 70+ portfolio companies and a 72% IRR, outperforming even top decile funds of ~68% benchmarked by PitchBook and Preqin.

Venture University: In 2018, VU launched Venture University, which has become the world’s leading VC/PE investor accelerator, and includes an academic program and an investment apprenticeship program. The academic program includes a VC/PE Masterclass, Advanced VC/PE Modules, and weekly Fireside Chats. The investment apprenticeship program selects ~1% of candidates (~50 cohort members globally per quarter) to join VU’s investment team where they focus on deal sourcing, conducting due diligence, investment evaluation, presenting at weekly Partner Meetings, presenting/participating on investment committees, and sharing in the upside on the investments made via a profit sharing agreement. Cohort members can choose to participate in the investor accelerator for 3–12 months in order to build a track record of up to ~20–25 portfolio companies (~5–6 investments per quarter).

VU Has Developed A Number Of Unfair & Sustainable Competitive Advantages To Outperform For Investors:

• Professionally Managed Fund: VU Venture Partners is led by 3 senior investment partners who have 45+ yrs of venture capital experience as top tier funds, previously investing $1.8B+ in 250+ companies, yielding over a 4x+ net realized cash-on-cash return, and have been some of the earliest and largest investors in over 20+ unicorns including Beyond Meat, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Dropbox, Pinterest, Venmo, Oculus, Oscar, Palantir, Wish, and others.
• A Global Presence With Local Knowledge & Access: VU has headquarter offices in San Francisco, Austin, and Hong Kong and manages a global investment team across North America, LatAm, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. This allows VU to have the necessary local knowledge of complex markets and to reach opportunities that are difficult for other funds to reach.
• Targeting The Largest Global Market Opportunities & The Most Risk Adjusted VC Returns: VU actively seeks out the largest global market opportunities, often with SAMs (serviceable address markets) of $10B+, which can generate 10–100x returns per deal, inclusive of dilution from follow-on rounds, and investing at the pre-seed to early growth stage.
• 10x Larger Team Size To Effectively Filter Through High Volume Early Stage Investments: The largest deal flow volume exists at the earliest stages, with ~80% of VC deal flow volume being Seed to Series B stage companies. Historically VC funds have been significantly limited in their sourcing and evaluation capabilities due to small teams (3–20 people) supported by a management fee on funds ($10M-$500M). VU disrupted the VC model with a 70+ person global investment team with only a $100M fund, but has the capabilities of operating at the scale of a $1B+ fund. A $1B+ fund can not effectively do early stage venture capital because they have too much capital to deploy and need to do later stage large check deals, however VU is able to focus investing in the highest returning and highest quality opportunities at the earliest stages without the requirement of deploying very large checks.
• A Generalist Fund With Vertical & Industry Expertise: VU has 7 vertical teams, including Consumer & Enterprise (two generalist teams) and five more vertical focused teams each with their industry expertise: FinTech (Financial Services, Crypto, & NFTs), Frontier (AI, Robotics, Advanced Materials, & SpaceTech), Healthcare (HealthTech, Medical Devices, Biotech, & Pharma), PropTech (Residential & Commercial Real Estate Tech & Construction Tech), and Web3 (Metaverse, Blockchain, VR/AR, Web3 Layers). The unprecedented size and quality of VU’s investment team for a Seed / Series A fund allows it to be staffed with highly experienced experts in their fields to efficiently source and conduct deep due diligence on opportunities that other funds of this size cannot afford.
• Unprecedented Deal Flow Volume & Hyper Selectivity: VU sources and reviews 20,000+ companies per year, 10x more deal flow than a traditional VC fund, and invests in ~15–20 new portfolio companies per year, a ~0.1% selectivity, 10x more selective than a traditional VC fund.
• High Quality Team: VU accepts ~1% of the investor candidates to join their team per year in order to have some of the best professionals in the industry and assemble vertical teams from varied backgrounds such as top tier VC partners, investment bankers from shops firms like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, McKinsey and Bain consultants, world class scientists and academics from prestigious universities like Stanford, Harvard, MIT & others, and from top executives from tech giants (Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft, etc.)
• Community & Network: VU has 23K+ followers on LinkedIn and 145K+ community members, much larger than many $1B+ VC funds. VU’s sustainable competitive advantage comes from its world leading investor accelerator it operates called Venture University, the “YC for VC”. Venture University has graduated 550+ investors from its program, which has a ~1% acceptance rate, and these individuals go on to join other VC/PE funds at Analyst to Partner level roles (~66% get VC/PE jobs with 12 months of graduating), are emerging fund managers, angels, and family offices. Over the next few years VU will have graduated over 1,000+ VU alumni, who are insiders at a growing number of VC/PE funds, providing proprietary access to deal flow globally. VU’s powerful network and community has led to one of the largest and highest quality deal flow funnels in the industry.

Join Bonded:

If you are an accredited investor (angel investor / family office) and you would like to join Bonded — VU’s Affinity Investor Network, you can sign up here by completing this form.