[NEWS] David Sacks’s Craft Ventures just closed its second fund with $500 million – Loganspace

Craft Ventures, the mission agency launched in 2017 by serial entrepreneur David Sacks, has closed its second fund with $500 million in capital commitments, an amount the agency became said to open focusing onroughly a year ago.

Craft’s debut fund had closed with $350 million.

The outfit — which Sacks runs with assorted serial entrepreneurs Bill Lee (Remarq, Social Ideas), Jeff Fluhr (StubHub, Spreecast) and Sky Dayton (who has essentially based and co-essentially based alotof firms) — invests in sequence seed, A and B rounds, in a huge resolution of firms that neatly match into each and every investor’s wheelhouse.

For his segment, Sacks, who became the COO of PayPal before founding the family tree web discipline Geni.com, then Yammer, is targeted on both person and enterprise startups so long as they would possibly be able to hasten viral.

His signature bet at Craft isBird, the e-scooter firm whose Series A spherical Craft led. (Bird founder Travis VanderZanden introduced the firm’s Series D spherical of $275 million at a $2.5 billion valuation all the diagram in which by means of our most up-to-dateTechCrunch Disrupt match.)

Fluhr makes a speciality of marketplaces and e-commerce startups, and the agency cites as one of his extra prominent provides the Series A spherical of the nursing marketplaceRelied on Health. Lee is targeted on step forward technologies and counts among his investments the esports firmCloud9, a firm that went on to lift$50 millionin Series B funding final year (and is maybe attributable to remark but some other spherical quickly).

Meanwhile, Dayton — who’s terribly particularly a co-founder with Travis Kalanick in CloudKitchens, the darkish kitchen firm that’s literally attempting torecall over the enviornment— makes a speciality of so-known as involving tech, drawing on his trip of launching the dial-up pioneer EarthLink, collectively with the Wi-Fi provider provider Boingo Wi-fi.

All four comprise impressive portfolios as angel merchants, collectively with bets on Verify, Airbnb, Fb, Houzz and Slack, although naturally, they’ve additionally backed startups that haven’t proved winners. An funding in the HR payroll startup, Zenefits proved particularly trying for Sacks, who acquired an infinite stake in the firm and — when its founding CEO, Parker Conrad, becameoustedamid a regulatory scandal — stepped in to recall a gape at to fix its errant methods. (He left after no longer up to a year on the helm.)

It’s too quickly in the occasion that they’ll comprise as mighty success as a bunch, but some of Craft’s extra most up-to-date bets encompassTerminal, a San Francisco-essentially based entirely mostly startup that helps firms to offer and arrange a long way flung engineers in international locations; it raised$17 millionin funding correct final month.

One other isSuperplastic, a year-passe, Burlington, Vt.-essentially based entirely mostly maker of small-version art toys that’s attempting to flip two of its characters into animated digital media stars. It raised$10 millionin Series A funding led by Craft in the summer season.

At the agency’s outset, blockchain became a significant theme, although Craft appears to be like to be instant-evolving into an outfit that invests a long way extra broadly.

It’ll also merely had been too early. Not no longer up to, Harbor, a decentralized compliance protocol that objectives to standardize the strategy crypto securities are issued, became a deal that Craft introduced at some stage in the the same time that it became itself launching publicly. Nonetheless Harbor’s founders comprise since left the firm to openInternal, astartup that desires to assist firms better arrange their inner consoles so that they would possibly be able to guarantee that that that no longer all americans on workers has receive accurate of entry to to sensitive records.

Internal closed on $5 million in seed funding led by Craft final month, a deal wewrote about right here.