Ward Hendon isn't new to the world of startups and technology. Neither are Gaby Darbyshire or Mike Lin, the two managing partners who, alongside Hendon, form upstart Santa Fe-based venture firm Dangerous Ventures.
Darbyshire is a co-founder of Gawker Media, which she left before its $135 million Univison acquisition, and Lin founded and ran Fenix International, a renewable energy and financing startup. Hendon, for his part, co-founded tech-enabled legal services firm Axiom Law, which sold to Permira in 2019.
Hendon, Dangerous Ventures' managing partner, Darbyshire and Lin launched Dangerous Ventures in early 2023. The firm operates two separate investment funds — one focused globally, and the other focused on investments in New Mexico-based startups.
Its inaugural funds will be "pre-seed and seed primarily," Hendon told New Mexico Inno. That means Dangerous won't look to lead investment rounds but instead partner with other firms to co-invest in promising startups.
"When you're in a pre-seed, you're typically not pricing rounds where you have a lead, so we're very comfortable being first money in in those sort of deals," Hendon said.
Dangerous' focus with its early-stage New Mexico fund is on climate technologies in the state. That includes tech in growing economic sectors around New Mexico, such as the state's hydrogen and alternative energy economy and oil and gas industry, Hendon said.
Helping New Mexico diversify its economy through climate tech investing is a big part of the firm's mission, he added.
"We've really got to think about these new economies for the state, whether it's entertainment or climate tech, or anything in between beyond fossil fuels," Hendon said. "Fossil fuels have been a huge boon for the state, clearly, but it's on everybody's mind how do we diversify beyond that for the future? I think climate tech can be one of those areas."
Hendon moved to Santa Fe, where Dangerous Ventures is based, in 2020. Darbyshire and Lin, Dangerous' general partners, are both based in California — specifically, Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively.
While the trio hasn't deployed any capital out of Dangerous' New Mexico fund yet, Hendon said the firm expects its first investments out of that fund to come in January 2024. It's targeting investments in about 30 companies out of its first global fund and around 15 to 20 companies out of its first New Mexico fund, he said.
Dangerous has a "backlog of companies" in the state it's been talking to over the past year about potential deals, too, Hendon added.
New Mexico's State Investment Council (SIC), an institutional investment body that manages billions in permanent and governmental funds for the state, committed $10 million to Dangerous' New Mexico fund, called Dangerous Ventures New Mexico Fund I, at its Nov. 28 meeting. That investment came out of the SIC's New Mexico private equity program, an investment strategy that takes state Severance Tax dollars and puts them into funds with the expectations of investments in the state.
Khosla Ventures, a larger Menlo Park, California-based venture firm, received a $75 million aggregate commitment through the SIC's New Mexico private equity program for three of its funds during the council's Nov. 28 meeting, as well.
Hendon said Dangerous plans to raise more money for its New Mexico fund to "top off" the SIC's $10 million commitment. The firm's targeting $25 million for its global fund, he added.
There's been a recent influx of venture capital into the state, primarily through other SIC commitments into both out-of-state funds like America's Frontier Fund and Antler U.S. and New Mexico-based VC Tramway Ventures. Some of those recent commitments have gone into funds with a similar climate technology focus to Dangerous Ventures, like Playground Global and Khosla — the latter of which recently led the emergence round of Los Alamos-based direct air capture startup Spiritus Technologies.
Spiritus is one example of a startup built around technology spun out of national laboratories in the state — namely, Los Alamos National Laboratory. Collaborating with both public and private groups in the state to unlock similar sorts of technologies will be a key for Dangerous as it starts making New Mexico investments, Hendon said.
"If you look down the road, there's some doomsday scenarios that we've got to try to stay a couple steps ahead of," he said. "We want to prime the pump in the labs, start working with entrepreneurs early and build teams to commercialize that technology and provide the capital and mentoring that it will take to get across the valley of death and have successful companies."
