SignalFire, just six years old, has raised $500 million across two new funds
0Reported today on TechCrunch
For the full article visit: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/09/signalfire-just-six-years-old-has-raised-500-million-across-two-new-funds/
SignalFire, just six years old, has raised $500 million across two new funds
SignalfFire, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based venture firm that prides itself on mining what it says is more actionable data about, well, the world, has just raised a pair of funds that total $500 million in capital commitments.
One of the vehicles is a $200 million "seed" fund that SignalFire will use to write checks up to $5 million in nascent startups; the other is a $300 million fund designed to invest in those of the firm's portfolio companies that are beginning to pull away from the pack and need growth-stage funding.
Both are a major step up for the young firm, which closed its debut fund with $53 million in 2015 before raising $330 million in capital across two funds in 2017.
According to firm founder Chris Farmer - who founded SignalFire after logging several years at both Bessemer Venture Partners and General Catalyst - the firm also has many more people investing the money. Altogether, SignalFire now employs 30 people across an engineering and data science unit; a unit dedicated to portfolio operations; and a unit that does the actual venture investing.
The latter now features three general partners in addition to Farmer. Among them: Ilya Kirnos, a former software engineer at Oracle, then Google, who joined Farmer at the outset and is also the firm's CTO; Wayne Hu, who joined SignalFire in 2015 and today leads many of its seed-stage investments; and Walter Kortschak, who joined the firm in 2016 after spending 26 years at the private equity firm Summit Partners, where he establishing the firm's West Coast investment practice.
Others associated with the company include Alex Garden, the cofounder and CEO of the food-focused robotics company Zume, an