Adeyemi "Ade" Ajao zigs even when most other people are zagging, and the strategy seems to be paying off at the venture firm he co-founded and manages, Base10 Partners.
On Tuesday, the San Francisco firm announced Fund III — its fourth and largest fund — with $460 million in commitments for early-stage investments, which brings its total assets under management to more than $1 billion.
The firm has primarily focused on earlier stage investments, but last year the team also raised $300 million for a growth fund and has pledged to donate half of all carried interest generated from it to historically Black colleges and universities.
Ajao is Spanish and Nigerian, and one of the few Black VCs in Silicon Valley. He sees diversity as a strength, as well as a source of strong returns for investors.
"We have one metric. Financial returns. Period," Ajao told me. "We just happen to think that a lot of the people that are going to be good at solving a lot of these problems for the 99% are not going to be white males that grew up in the Bay Area. So, we will see where our research will take us but that's our guess."
The firm has 79 companies in its portfolio including Plaid, Brex, Rappi, Favor (formerly Pill Club), Figma and Notion.
More than 60% of the founders in Base10's portfolio identify as Black, indigenous or people of color (BIPOC), and the firm also says that more than half of its portfolio companies are located outside of the Bay Area.
It's a stark contrast to the broader venture capital industry that largely invests in white, male founders.
Base10 is focused on investing in four main areas under the umbrella of automation: food, retail, logistics and global fintech.
For Ajao, the firm's strategy is about looking for companies that are solving problems for real people around the world. The strategy also includes maximizing returns, of course.
Base10 hasn't disclosed any investments from its newest fund, but the firm will stay focused on its global strategy as it dives deep into data to find trends that are worth investing in.
Now, more than a quarter of its portfolio companies are valued at $1 billion or more.
In 2017, Ajao personally invested in Instacart when the startup was valued at a mere $3.4 billion. Last year, the company was valued at $39 million, but in March the company voluntarily slashed its valuation nearly 40% to $24 billion amid tech's broader downturn and speculation about a potential IPO.
That's still a seven-fold increase in valuation in five years, and comfortably keeps Instacart in the unicorn club.
"I'm not very worried about tech," Ajao said. "I worry more about the real economy. I think that tech has an opportunity to be a redistributor of wealth, not an aggregator of wealth but we have to push for that. Because if not, things are not going to look great."
