Durham venture capital firm Bull City Venture Partners has closed on an oversubscribed fourth fund – this time securing $53 million in capital commitments.
The firm, which made the announcement Thursday, focuses on seed and early-stage companies, primarily in the Southeast. And several local companies are in its portfolio, such as Adwerx, Zift Solutions and Reveal Mobile.
In an interview, co-founder Jason Caplain said raising a fund in a Covid-19 world was “tricky,” and involved a combination of masked pitches and Zoom calls. He credits the firm’s recent successes with selling the value proposition to limited partners.
In the last eight months, the firm’s portfolio has seen five exits, including Shutterfly's buyout of Spoonflower, a Durham-based firm that prints custom fabrics.
The playbook for the fourth fund remains the same, Caplain said.
“The mission is the same. It’s us having the ability to double down on what we’ve done in the past," he said.
Caplain said the firm's funds typically target 15 or so companies, primarily in the software space. Its region of interest runs from Philadelphia to Atlanta out to Nashville, Tennessee, though many of its investments from past funds center on Triangle companies.
Bull City, co-founded by David Jones, has already put capital from the fourth fund to work, investing in firms such as Durham's Tiny Earth Toys and Levitate, a Raleigh company founded by serial entrepreneur Jesse Lipson (ShareFile).
Bull City also takes cold pitches, publishing partners' emails on its website.
Serial entrepreneur Scot Wingo said the fund is big news for the region. Bull City’s founders, through their previous firm, Southern Capitol, were one of the earliest investors of Morrisville-based ChannelAdvisor (NYSE: ECOM), the e-commerce software company Wingo helped start.
Bull City has also invested in Wingo's latest startup, on-demand car care firm Get Spiffy.
Wingo said the Bull City team has an “unwavering passion for startups and our region.”
The new fund could help create future ChannelAdvisors, Red Hats, Pendos and Bandwidths, he said.
“That’s what we need to really accelerate the Triangle startup flywheel, more capital and more companies getting to IPO or a big M&A liquidity event,” Wingo said. “Those liquidity events inject more startup dollars into the ecosystem, plus encourage the next generation of entrepreneurs … and those are the two biggest inputs that make the flywheel go faster and faster.”
Bull City’s last fund raised $26 million. With the latest tranche, the firm’s total assets under management now exceed $100 million.