INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Craft Ventures, the venture firm launched in 2017 by serial entrepreneur David Sacks, has closed its second fund with $500 million in
capital commitments, an amount the firm was said to begin targeting roughly a year ago.
Craft debut fund had closed with $350 million.
The
outfit — which Sacks runs with other serial entrepreneurs Bill Lee (Remarq, Social Concepts), Jeff Fluhr (StubHub, Spreecast), and Sky
Dayton (who has founded and cofounded a lot of companies) — invests in series seed, A, and B rounds, in a wide range of companies that
neatly fit into each investor wheelhouse.
For his part, Sacks, who was the COO of PayPal before founding the genealogy website Geni.com,
then Yammer, is focused on both consumer and enterprise startups as long as they can go viral.
His signature bet at Craft is Bird, the
e-scooter company whose Series A round Craft had led
(Bird founder Travis VanderZanden announced the company Series D round of $275 million at a $2.5 billion valuation at our recent TechCrunch
Disrupt event.)
Fluhr meanwhile focuses on marketplaces and e-commerce startups and the firm cites as one of his more prominent deals the
Series A round of the nursing marketplace Trusted Health
Lee is focused on breakthrough technologies and counts among his investments the esports company Cloud9, a company that went on to raise $50
million in Series B funding last year (and is probably due to announce yet another round soon)
And Dayton — who is very notably a cofounder with Travis Kalanick in CloudKitchens, the dark kitchen company that literally trying to take
over the world— focuses on so-called hard tech, drawing on his experience with launching the dial-up pioneer EarthLink, along with the
WiFi service provider Boingo Wireless.
Some of the Craft more recent bets include Terminal, a San Francisco-based startup that helps
companies to source and manage remote engineers in international locations; it raised $17 million in funding just last month
Another is Superplastic, a year-old, Burlington, Vt.-based maker of limited edition art toys that trying to turn two of its characters into
animated digital media stars
It raised raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Craft in summer.
At firm outset, blockchain was a major theme, though the firm
appears to fast-evolving into an outfit that invests far more broadly.
It may have just been too early
Indeed, Harbor, a decentralized compliance protocol that aims to standardize the way crypto securities are issued was a deal that Craft
announced around the same time that it was itself launching publicly
But Harbor founders have since left the company to start Internal, a startup that wants to help companies better manage their internal
consoles so they can ensure that not everyone on staff has access to sensitive data
It closed on $5 million in seed funding led by Craft last month, a deal that we&d written about here.
