Atlanta-based investment firm BIP Capital has closed on a new $101 million venture capital fund to back startups here and throughout the country.
According to a news release, the fund will be used in Series A and Series B rounds for B2B SaaS startups and tech-enabled services companies with a focus on enterprise SaaS, health care IT, digital media, dev tools and martech.
BIP Capital, which primarily invests in companies in the southeast, will continue to invest in local companies and expand into the Midwest, where it has already made a few investments. The fund is comprised of capital invested by family offices, high-net-worth individuals and institutional investors. Currently, the VC firm has more than 30 companies in its portfolio.
"Increasingly, Atlanta and other cities outside Boston, New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area are being recognized as vibrant innovation centers with promising opportunities for investment," Mark Buffington, co-founder and CEO of BIP Capital, said in a statement. "Since our founding, our mission has been to drive top quartile returns while also growing emerging company ecosystems. The close of Venture Fund IV will support us in continuing these endeavors. We're proud of the successes we've been a part of to date, and we're excited by the prospect of helping more companies grow into market leaders."
Earlier this summer, the VC firm was recognized as the most active venture capital investor in Georgia for the fourth consecutive year, according to CB Insights. In October, BIP Capital released its 2019 The State of Startups in the Southeast report, which takes an in-depth look at startup activity throughout nine states in the Southeast over a five-and-a-half-year period.
Companies BIP Capital has invested in include Tropical Smoothie Cafe, ThingTech, QA Symphony, Kobiton, UserIQ, VoApps and more.
“We continue to hunt for opportunities in spaces where we have deep domain expertise and large leverage-able networks," Buffington told Atlanta Inno. "That includes health care IT, sports and media tech, payment tech, enterprise SaaS, software tools and thoughtful allocations of emerging technologies like machine learning and computer vision. Our pipeline of deals in these spaces continues to be robust."
Early indicators suggest BIP Capital will see a contraction of valuations in the venture space next year, Buffington said.
"This should help us find more deals that we can invest in at reasonable prices," he said. "In the last few years, we have had to walk away from a large number of deals because they were priced at levels that we could not get comfortable with. The beginning of a reversion to mean historical prices seems to be underway.”
