We are pleased to announce that we have closed on NextView IV. This is a fresh $100M fund with the same high-conviction, hands-on seed strategy that we’ve been pursuing since the start of NextView over 10 years ago.

$100M is a meaningful increase from our $50M third fund, though it’s still quite small in the grand scheme of venture, especially amid the recent wave of late stage financings and SPACs. We believe that this fund is the perfect size for us to be the best possible partners to early-stage entrepreneurs today.  As the definition of seed has expanded, our fund has gradually grown to target the full seed spectrum.  This new fund is still small enough to work with pre-launch, pre-seed or accelerator companies.  But it is also large enough to write a $2M check to lead a post-seed round for companies that are starting to scale.

What hasn’t changed is that our heart lies in working with founders to find product/market fit and to begin to grow. This work is our bread and butter, and pre-traction companies represent the vast majority of our investments. In our first two funds, we’ve been fortunate to seed five unicorns (Attentive, Whoop, Grove Collaborative, Skillz, and TripleLift) and 10 companies with $100M+ exits or recent valuations.  Thirteen of these 15 companies were seeded pre-revenue, and many were at concept stage or had rudimentary early products.

Our team continues to pursue a thematic approach to seed investing around our concept of the Everyday Economy. We see software upending the areas where large swaths of the population spend all of their time, money, and attention, and we want to collaborate with founders that are bringing forward a more prosperous, equitable, and exciting future in these areas. 

This year also marks the 10-year anniversary of the founding of NextView. My partners and I feel lucky to have been able to practice the craft of early-stage investing during these years of tremendous growth and opportunity. We are also pleased that we have been one of the few firms that have had zero turnover among the founders, have been able to expand and level-up our partnership, and have enjoyed almost no organizational drama. A future post will talk about some of the practices we’ve intentionally adopted over the years to create a culture of shared ownership and collaboration.  But we also realize that we’ve just been lucky to team up with one another at the right point on our respective careers. 

As a small fund, NextView has a tight-knit LP base, many of whom have been with us from our earliest days. With fund IV, we were targeting only a small increase in fund size, but ended up raising up to our hard cap in order to bring in a select number of new institutions to the NextView family.  This includes several wonderful non-profit foundations and endowments with 100+ year histories and missions that align well with our own.  Each time that we set out to raise a new fund, we deeply believe that we are going to be able to deliver superior returns to our investors.   But we also recognize that venture capital is a tough bet as an LP -with long time horizons, lack of liquidity, and uncertain outcomes. Because of this, we are always grateful to all of our LPs for their trust. We will never take it for granted.

Most importantly, we want to say thank you to each and every founder that we’ve had the privilege to work with. Investors take chances when they invest in seed stage companies, but founders take a profoundly larger chance when selecting a lead investor or board member for their company. Whether a company fulfills its full aspirations or not, we are always grateful for the opportunity to be a part of the adventure.  

We look forward to the new adventures ahead, and hope that we are able to partner with many of you to help design the future that we want to live in!

Rob, David, Lee, Melody, and Leah