附近上门

Scale Venture Partners has closed a $400 million fund. It has participated in a known total of 195 venture deals, leading in 76 of those rounds, according to 附近上门. The firm told 附近上门 News that its assets under management currently amount to about $1.8 billion.

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Scale Venture Partners was formerly part of Bank of America鈥檚 venture capital arm, but it spun out as an independent entity for its . After that, the firm focused its investments on business software technology. Notably, the VC firm led DocuSign鈥檚 in December 2010 and participated in the company鈥檚 in 2014. Scale VP was also an investor in . With its new Fund VI, the firm plans to invest in technology companies leveraging artificial intelligence.

鈥淚 do think there鈥檚 an AI euphoria that鈥檚 pervaded the current dialogue that鈥檚 resulted in the explosion of companies claiming to be built on AI that simply won鈥檛 survive.鈥� Rory O鈥橠riscoll, a partner at SVP who also serves on Box and Docusign鈥檚 board, told 附近上门 News in an email. But while he believes that hype exists, he says Scale VP focuses on funding viable companies based on certain criteria:

鈥淭o me, the key characteristics that nearly all successful AI companies share are that they: address well-defined challenges and solve specific, discrete problems; work with large data sets; quantify how AI improves a product or business; match AI to value (they鈥檙e monetizable); are solving problems where fallacy is acceptable (meaning, the 1% of the time that the AI gets the answer wrong, it鈥檚 not a deal breaker or life threatening); and have a go to market strategy that focuses on the people who benefit (not those who stand to lose their jobs).鈥�

The group鈥檚 recent investments include startups from insurance to translation to security. The firm participated in Root Insurance鈥檚 $51 million Series C, and it was also a lead investor in enterprise security startup Big ID鈥檚 $30 million Series B in late June 2018.

鈥淪caleVP鈥檚 investment focus is on companies that have demonstrated product-market fit and are early in revenue,鈥� O鈥橠riscoll told 附近上门 News. He added that 84 percent of Scale VP鈥檚 investments for Fund V were in Series A and B ventures, and while the firm does not have a minimum revenue threshold, O鈥橠riscoll said it prefers companies that 鈥渉ave a few million run rate and are looking to accelerate their go-to-market execution.鈥�

As far as the size of individual investments, O鈥橠riscoll explained that Series A and B investments tend to stay within a particular range.

鈥淲e鈥檝e found that a $5-25 million investment tends to be the range that most Series A and B business software companies, including AI-powered technologies, need at that stage,鈥� O鈥橠riscoll wrote.

In addition to its fund, Scale Venture Partners is launching a beta version of its Scale Studio platform. The open-source platform will allow startups to compare important benchmarks and metrics, including Scale鈥檚 and , to the growth strategies of other private companies.

鈥淚t allows companies to pull relevant quarterly metrics like growth rate, sales efficiency, customer retention, and OpEx benchmarks like sales and marketing spend as a percentage of revenue,鈥� O鈥橠riscoll explained.

With the platform, Scale VP is aiming to provide private startups the ability to track and scale growth.

鈥淭raditionally, annual planning processes are an exercise in uncertainty and politics, Scale Studio brings increased rigor to this process,鈥� O鈥橠riscoll wrote. Further, he sees the Scale Studio as a tool that companies will be able to incorporate into their yearly planning processes.

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Editorial Note: Scale Venture Partners informed 附近上门 News that its previous AUM was $1.2 billion. The article has since been updated to reflect its current AUM of $1.8 billion.