If this is your first time getting our update, welcome to the fam! VSC Ventures is built on the core thesis that it has gotten easier than ever before to start a startup, but harder than ever before for that company to get noticed. We're building a one-of-a-kind fund to invest in early stage startups AND help them break out!
For those who need a quick refresher: Since 2002, VSC our award-winning comms firm has represented 475+ brands including 3 IPOs, 13 unicorns, and 50 startups that have exited. Experimenting with our own capital to date, VSC demonstrated our access into competitive rounds, investing in 37 companies, including breakouts like Poshmark, PAX, Tonal, Nearpod, and more. Building upon the investment processes honed through investments off our balance sheet, we've raised our first outside capital for VSC Ventures Fund I, LP
|
|
VSC Ventures Fund Update — Aug 2021
|
|
FUND RAISE UPDATE: Thanks to the incredible interest from LPs in VSC Ventures Fund I, in the 5 months since we started fundraising, we have closed just over $13M (+$2M since July) towards our goal of a $20M Fund I. From LP feedback, this is one of the faster timeline to get to this point as a first time fund, which is a very positive signal. We aim to wrap up the full fund raise by the end of Q1 2022.
WELCOME NEW VSC LPs: We could not be more thrilled with our LP base so far. VSC Ventures is backed by a healthy mix of family offices, first-time fund investors, executives from Poshmark (IPO), Discord (valued $14Bn+), Tinder (valued $3Bn+), Krux (acq. by Salesforce for $700M), Nearpod (acq. by Renaissance for $660M), Liftoff (valued $1B+) as well as General Partners of established funds with whom we often co-invest.
FUND-MARKET FIT: Our expertise in PR & Media Strategy is why we get allocations into the competitive deals. Almost daily a new investor or founder tweets or writes about the value of distribution for early stage startups and how few funds can provide that for their companies. In particular, VSC Ventures' thesis has resonated with our co-investors, who've seen good portfolio companies struggle to generate awareness from customers, employees and future investors — and bring us into rounds to avoid these mistakes in the future.
|
|
PORTFOLIO UPDATES
Each update, we'll share news about investments. For our LPs, we'll follow up with more detail about new marks & material updates in VSC portfolio positions.
|
|
Key Highlights on our First Investment: Goodcall
- Goodcall enables small business owners to answer calls via their AI assistant, triages customer queries across voice and text, and improves accuracy of responses through feedback loops.
- Founder Bob Summers initially launched it as 'CallJoy' in Google's Area 120 Labs and spun it out this year into a standalone business.
- Cloud-based freemium model (500 free monthly minutes!) aimed at 32M+ solopreneurs and small businesses across the US — with additional $19/mo Pro and $49/mo Premium paid tiers
- $4M Round led by Neo Ventures (Ali Partovi, invented LinkExchange) and Foothill Ventures (Eric Rosenblum; Foothill were the earliest investor in Zoom) with Xoogler Ventures, Verissimo Ventures, VSC Ventures
- Notable angel investors in this round include Harry Hurst (Pipe.com), Spencer Raskoff (Hotwire, Zillow), Michael Stoppelman (Google, Yelp) plus current and former executives of Google
TechCrunch article linked here (check out that VSC Ventures shoutout!)
For VSC Ventures LPs: We have a detailed written deal memo available upon request
|
|
CONTENT CORNER — FASTBREAK ON Q.S.B.S.
One of VSC Ventures' superpowers is our ability to create high-quality video content, both quickly and cost effectively and we started leaning into that this past month with our first video on QSBS or Qualified Small Business Stock.
|
|
Early stage investing has some major benefits and our very own Jay Kapoor made a video about one of the biggest secrets: Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS). Our video above garnered 15K+ views on Twitter in just one week. If you have further questions about QSBS, don't hesitate to reach out!
|
|
Thank you so much for reading our latest update from VSC Ventures Fund I. We're in the early days of our long and healthy partnership with all of you, so please reach out to us with additional questions on anything above. Thank you again for your support for our vision and our fund!
Best,
Vijay Chattha & Jay Kapoor
|
|
|
|
|
