Soon there will be more venture capital dollars flowing to early-stage technology companies in Colorado, and some of it is coming from well-known names in the industry.
Denver-based Range Ventures, a VC firm investing in local startups, recently completed raising a $39 million fund. The fund, called Range Fund II, will make investments in Colorado-based startups over the next three to four years.
Range plans to invest in 23 to 25 businesses through this fund. About 70% of the funds will go toward a startup’s seed round and the remaining 30% will go toward pre-seed rounds, said Chris Erickson, co-founder and managing director of Range.
Limited partners who invested in Fund II include local entrepreneurs and founders, such as Havenly’s Lee Mayer, Ibotta’s Bryan Leach, Foundry co-founder Seth Levine, Techstars co-founder Brad Feld, and Guild’s Rachel Romer Carlson and Bijal Shah. Colorado and California-based S-Cubed Capital also participated in this fund, Erickson said.
Range takes an agnostic approach to its investments, rather than only backing businesses in a certain industry like software or fintech.
“We like founders with unique, earned insights building in categories or industries that have been often overlooked by others because they think they’re either unsexy or too small or just not familiar with [the industry],” Erickson said.
Range would rather be the first fund to financially back a business building something unique than invest in the “hundredth generative AI for sales enablement,” platform, he added.
The VC firm has already made seven investments out of Fund II, with capital going to Cascade Biocatalysts, MagicSchool, BettrData.io, BugZero, Scholarly Software, BoltWise and HappyDoc.
Range last raised a fund when Erickson and Adam Burrows co-founded the firm in 2020. Fund I was deployed to 23 companies over three-and-a-half years, Erickson said.
“We actually think that now is one of the most exciting times as an investor, and I think also as a founder,” Erickson said. “From a market perspective, it is definitely tougher for both funds and tougher for founders to raise money in this environment. And so the founders that we are meeting, I think, are grittier and more determined and more capital efficient from the start than any time over the past five or six years.”
Erickson said AI tools also allow founders to build companies and do things cheaper, better and faster than traditional software. (Erickson is also a vocal leader in Colorado’s tech industry asking policymakers to curtail a first-in-the-nation law that regulates AI.)
Range Ventures is one of the Denver area’s largest VC firms, according to Denver Business Journal research, but isn’t the only firm to raise capital in recent months. Bozeman, Montana-based Next Frontier Capital, an early-stage VC firm with an office in Boulder, raised a $102 million fund in mid-September.
