These are the ~ 115 VCs we’ve worked with so far
People often ask us ‘which other investors do you usually work with?’ or ‘when your companies go on to raise money from US investors, do…
People often ask us ‘which other investors do you usually work with?’ or ‘when your companies go on to raise money from US investors, do you have a couple of preferred partners?’. In fact, just two days ago — I had already written 90% of this post — an LP asked me about our follow-on investors as we were walking over the Western Wall Plaza in Jerusalem, of all places (during a wonderful tour organized by our friends at Vintage IP). True story.
These are good questions to ask, since follow-on investors play a critical role in the fate of our portfolio companies. As a seed investor, our primary aspiration is to be the best possible partner in the early days of the journey. And while we do aspire to deliver value-add way beyond the seed stage, we know that different stages require different types of investors — firms with different fund sizes but also board members with different skills and experiences. A key area we try to help our portfolio companies with is, therefore, to attract the best possible Series A investors for the particular business.
With that in mind, I dug into the data from our four funds as well as the angel investments I did before Point Nine to create a list of all investors who invested in at least one of our portfolio companies:
Index (5) Enern (4) Insight (4) RTA (4) Runa (4) Accel (3) Acton (3) Atomico (3) Benchmark (3) General Catalyst (3) SaaStr (3) DN (2) GGV (2) Kite (2) Lakestar (2) Lightspeed (2) Luxor (2) Matrix (2) Rocket (2) Salesforce Ventures (2) Storm (2) Tengelmann (2) YC (2) 42cap Access Alven Bessemer Blumberg Cap Horn Cherry Connect CRV DFJ DN Capital DST Earlybird EBRD Emergence EQT Felicis Fosun Kinzon General Atlantic Goldman Sachs Greylock Grotech IDInvest Intel Capital Kima Kinnevik KPCB Kreos Localglobe Mangrove Market One MCI MHS Munich Venture Partners Naspers NEA Nokia Growth Partners Northzone Omers Origin Phenomen Prime Protos Rally Redpoint Ribbit RuNet Sapphire Scottish Equity Partners Senovo Sequoia Serena Smedvig Sozo SpeedInvest Square Peg Summit Target Global Trinity Valar Ventech Version One Vorwerk
(If the investor has invested in more than one Point Nine portfolio company, the number of companies is indicated in brackets.)
As you can see, there are a number of firms that have invested in two, three, or four Point Nine portfolio companies, and Index Ventures currently tops the list with five. What’s maybe more remarkable is just how long the ‘long tail’ is. In total, our portfolio companies have raised follow-on financing from almost 90 firms. To a certain extent, this is due to the geographic diversity of our portfolio, but it also shows how much choice founders have today.
Looking at co-investors, i.e. cases where we did our initial investment together with another investor, we get the following list:
RTA (7) Creandum (4) Fly (4) Kima (4) Alven (3) Localglobe (3) Piton (3) 500startups (2) Accel (2) Fathom (2) Holtzbrinck Ventures (2) Index (2) La Famiglia (2) Slack Fund (2) Seedcamp (2) Uncork (2) Version One (2) 42cap Balderton Benchmark Cowboy Dawn EBRD EQT General Catalyst Greylock IDinvest Kerala K-Fund Kite LaFamiglia Lowercase Matrix MHS Nokia Growth Partners Notion Peak Rocket Runa Social Capital Speedinvest System.one Target Global
Lastly, here are the investors who we’ve followed in at least one company, i.e. investors who invested in a company before us:
500startups (6) Techstars (5) YC (3) Kima (2) HTGF (2) FJ Labs (2) eFounders (2) Balderton Benchmark Faber Fathom Holtzbrinck Ventures Inventure Kizoo Lowercase Nexus Revel Rocket Seedcamp
We’ve included only institutional investors in this analysis, i.e. the many angel investors we’ve been fortunate to work together with aren’t included. The third list is therefore, not surprisingly, shorter, since we tend to be the first or amongst the first institutional investors in a startup