CommonAngels, a firm with roots as an angel investor consortium, has moved even closer to the venture capital model with a new $26.5 million, seed-stage fund and a new name—CommonAngels Ventures.
The Cambridge-based outfit is the latest in a string of VC firms locally to raise new money for investing into tech companies. Since May, a total of six local firms have closed new funds. Along with CommonAngels, NextView also has a seed-stage fund (smaller fund and smaller checks for early-stage companies). The other newly closed funds are later-stage or multi-stage.
But one of those firms, Charles River Ventures, is actually no longer a "local" firm, exactly. The once-Cambridge-based firm has abandoned its Boston-centric name in favor of the moniker CRV, and said that Silicon Valley will be the priority for the new fund. (CRV still has a presence in Cambridge, though.)
Altogether the new funds total $1.93 billion:
The steady fundraising by the local venture firms is part of a major turnaround from 2013, when VCs raised the lowest amount in a year since the financial crisis in 2010.
As for CommonAngels, here is the full announcement from senior managing director Maia Heymann:
We are making an announcement today that we closed our new fund at $26.5M! We also renamed the organization to CommonAngels Ventures.
We think our new fund---CommonAngels Ventures IV---is representative of a broader trend happening within venture capital of new business models. There are new and different ways of investing in start-ups, supporting them during their early stages and growth phases, and making healthy investment returns for our Fund's investors. We've combined the best of what experienced industry experts as investors bring to start-ups with a dedicated pool of capital of a venture fund. We often say we're providing capital and connections for the entrepreneurs we back.
When I joined last year in the leadership role, having been a Board member, the prior Chairman of CommonAngels and a member since 2006, we said we were going to change the organization. Our goal was to shift the focus to the entrepreneur as the "customer" and to operate with an efficient and clear process, while still providing the important connections of customers, partners, and new hires via our industry-experienced angels. Our Fund embodies that---we pooled our angels' capital.
We believe our efforts are part of a couple broader trends:
1) New business models in venture capital where it’s no longer a few partners doing all the work. There are full-service shops like A16Z, big networks like First Round Capital, institutionalized incubators like Project 11 and Blade here in town, and of course hybrids of incubators, funds & traditional VCs like TechStars; and
2) The increasing institutionalization of angel investing, whether new Angel List Syndicates, more fund formation, and professional management.
We’re consciously seeking to be able to scale & diversify a seed investing organization beyond what has been done in the past here in Boston. We’ve already made 10 investments under the new model, so it’s working. Some of the investments in the new Fund include: Loci Controls, Dunwello, Vivoom, Klipfolio, Wymsee and BlueConic.
Photo used with permission from CommonAngels Ventures.
