Emergence Capital, the foremost venture capital firm that deals with early-stage enterprise companies, recently revealed that it had raised a staggering $435 million fund.
According to details from the company, the money will be invested in companies that utilize machine learning in a bid to aid people in boosting their work productivity. The recently raised $435 million marks the venture capital’s fifth fund.
Emergence Capital’s focus on early-stage investments and thematic approach is distinctive amongst venture capital firms in the current financing environment. In fact, these qualities are known for being behind an array of investments and exits in industry-leading firms such as Textio, Bill.com, Gusto, Blend, Zoom, Intacct, and ServiceMax.
Most of these firms are currently have an individual value of more than $1 billion. This record is worth mentioning since Emergency Capital only makes, on average, about five to seven new investments per year.
Founded back in 2003 and headquartered in San Francisco, Emergence Capital raised its last fund amounting to $335 million in 2015 for investment in enterprise startups that focus on cloud infrastructure, mobile technology and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Emergence Capital’s new focus rests on companies that assist workers in learning from the best, and it is dubbed Coaching Networks.
The $435 million fund will concentrate on companies that offer coaching driven by conversational AI and data in helping people undertake their respective jobs better. Since it was established, Emergence Capital has specialized in financing early-stage startups as well as being on the front row seat as far as spotting and investing in latest and emerging technology trends is concerned.
Gordon Ritter, Emergence Capital ’s general partner and co-founder, told VentureBeat that any domain that you spend your time in each day would have a coaching network firm that possesses that particular domain in the future.
Furthermore, the coaching software is also being utilized in simplifying SaaS offers, especially for workers, which is something that Ritter is convinced could transform software.
In fact, his belief is well-demonstrated by various assistants such as Sensei from Adobe and Ava from Autodesk as well as voice-activated assistants that can aid in completing sophisticated workflows with software such as Photoshop and AutoCAD.
Jason Green, Emergence Capital’s general partner and co-founder, said that the company’s investment model would continue to be more successful since it enables Emergence Capital to collaborate with startups at an early stage. In turn, this gives the venture capital firm an opportunity to add value throughout their growth journey as well as to attain greater success in the long term.
He also asserted that Emergence Capital is currently in an era of both Series C and D rounds of funding and it has been filling the available gap in early-stage investing.
Based on a report from PwC MoneyTree, finding Series A financing is more difficult than the subsequent rounds. What’s more, 80 percent of the increment in US software investments since 2008 has mainly revolved around Series B fund and the rest that follow.
According to Eric S. Yuan, Zoom’s CEO and Founder, Emergence Capital was the firm’s initial Silicon Valley-based investor.
He also emphasized how the VC firm has enabled Zoom to grow considerably from a small startup to a company with more than 1,000 employees in three-plus years of partnership.
Source VentureBeat
