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Perspectives on entrepreneurship, startups and venture capital from K9 Ventures.

Announcing K9 Ventures, L.P. – a seed stage fund

By Manu Kumar | April 28, 2010

I’m pleased to announce the formation of K9 Ventures, L.P. – a seed-stage fund.

K9 Ventures, L.P. is a $6.25M fund that is designed to do concept and seed-stage investments in technology companies. The fund will be deployed over a period of 3-4 years, with initial investment in the range of $100K – $250K, while reserving capital to participate in the follow-on round. K9 expects to be an active investor in portfolio companies and will typically make only 4-6 new investments per year.

The fund focuses on investing in companies that meet the following necessary but not sufficient criteria:

  • Technical Founders: The founding team needs to be capable of building its own product and have the technical chops to make it happen.
  • Technical Product: The product must have some technical depth. Either protectable IP or at least hard IP.
  • Direct Revenue: The company must have a direct revenue model. No advertising, content or media businesses which may have a three-way business model, but rather companies which deliver direct value to paying customers.
  • Capital Efficient: Companies that need a Seed round, probably a Series A, but potentially may not need a Series B or Series C. No retail, no cleantech, no biotech etc.
  • Hyper Local: Entire team must be local to the San Francisco Bay Area. No distributed teams, and no outsourced product development.

The first closing for the fund was held in Q2 2009. K9 began investing in 2009 and is honored to have the following five companies in its portfolio:

K9 Ventures sits in between individual angels and institutional venture capital funds. The fund target was $6M and I’m pleased to meet (and slightly exceed) that target. You may call it a micro-cap VC fund or a super-angel fund. (Personally, I prefer just saying a seed stage fund, but as some folks have pointed out a super-angel sounds a lot better than a micro-VC! 😉 ) The objective is to provide entrepreneurs with a meaningful amount of capital and support to help the company build a sustainably profitable business.

I would like to take a moment to thank K9’s Limited Partners for their support of this first fund. Most of all I would like to thank the entrepreneurs who have allowed K9 to be part of their companies and their personal entrepreneurial journeys. In a lot of ways I see K9 as my next startup — except it’s a meta-level startup.

P.S.: The K9 Ventures website will be revamped to provide more details soon. In the interim, please follow @k9ventures and @manukumar for updates and direct any questions to manu@k9ventures.com.