[ibimage==24064==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-right]Foundry Group announced last week that it will continue to support its successful portfolio companies from previous funds through its newest fund, Foundry Group Select. Foundry Group Select will focus solely on investing up to $25 million these companies’ late-stage rounds.
With Foundry Select, the team stuck to the magic number of $225 million (the same as its previous three funds), but branched off from Foundry’s usual focus on early-stage companies. Over the past six years, Foundry has typically participated in small seed rounds, ranging from $250,000 to $500,000 and Series A rounds.
“We realized that we were not able to invest as much as we wanted in our later-stage, successful companies because of the size limitations of our early-stage funds,” Managing Director Brad Feld said. “Historically, we invested aggressively and consistently through the early rounds of a company, but once it reaches a success point and a valuation above a certain point we start backing off on our pro-rata. We realized that by not participating, we were simply leaving money on the table for us and our investors.”
The Foundry team prides itself on being “true early-stage investors,” but Foundry Group Select, which was first filed with the SEC in August, isn’t completely changing Foundry’s game: they are still dedicated to investing in the right people and the team has an avenue to continue that.
“We have a pipeline of companies we expect Foundry Group Select will invest in over the next few years,” Feld said. “Most of these companies aren't raising rounds in the near term, but when they do we'll be able to support them. We've already done several Foundry Group Select investments - one that was announced is the $43 million financing in Fitbit led by Softbank in which we participated.”
A few of Foundry Group’s current portfolio companies include FitBit, MapBox, DataHero, MongoLab, Next Big Sound and also well-known local companies such as SendGrid, TechStars, Sympoz, PivotDesk,Integrate, FullContact and Gnip.
October has been a month full of expansions for Foundry: the team just debuted its AngelList syndicate, FG Angel, a few weeks ago. Through FG Angel, Foundry Group will be able to stray from its usual thematic investments to more “promiscuous” ventures, Feld wrote in a blog post.
“Up until this point, we’ve been limited in the amount we can invest in these rounds due to our early-stage strategy,” Feld wrote. But now, Foundry has broken down these walls to explore new areas of investment and to continue support of previous companies.
