As the market swoons, venture capital firms continue to announce new funds.
TechCrunch reporters covered five of these more in-depth Tuesday, as you will see below.
Meanwhile, I corresponded with three firms about their funds and any concerns that limited partners had brought up during the fundraising stage.
Haris Khurshid, general partner at Chalo Ventures, launched a $50 million second fund focused on investing in Pakistani startups and a smaller percentage in Latin American startups.
“With a large population, Pakistan is geographically smaller, well-connected with fewer provinces, has lower regulatory barriers and doesn’t have strong incumbents,” Khurshid, who is originally from Pakistan, said via email. “This allows Pakistani startups to scale faster throughout the country and expand into other markets.”
The firm started raising two months ago and already secured $35 million in commitments and cash in hand. Khurshid said that he expects to close by the end of the second quarter and start investing in the third quarter.
Khurshid explained that the fundraising environment “wasn’t as challenging as we thought it would be,” and what helped was that specific goal of investing in Pakistan. He did say that LPs wanted to know how the firm would navigate investment in that market, which required the firm to do a bit of educating on why Pakistan needed a focused fund.
As the global venture capital market slows, is the US dodging the downturn?
Lorena Suarez, one of the managing partners of Argentina-based Alaya Capital, a 10-year-old early-stage VC firm, invests in impact-driven startups from Spanish-speaking Latin America. Last month, Alaya had the first closing of $80 million in capital commitments for its third fund.
Regarding LPs behavior, Suarez said via email that LPs were wondering if business fundamentals in LatAm were strong. As a result, “due diligence is taking additional time but has not impacted yet their final commitments. We’ve seen concern about how deep this financial crisis will be and how long the conflict in Europe will last with the impact it may have in the following years.”
However, she went on to say that Alaya saw other LPs being more active in investing “because it is known that vintages during crises perform better than any other moment.”
Over at Golden Section, a Houston-based founder studio and venture capital firm, the firm completed the first closing of its second fund in May, but did not disclose the amount. Chief marketing officer Yosef Levenstein said via email that the fund will ultimately be around $80 million. It focuses on early-stage B2B SaaS, so LP concerns were about how B2B software will perform in an inflationary environment, he wrote.
It’s been a busy day for new funds. Catch up on some from my colleagues:
- Jacquelyn Melinek reported on Multicoin Capital’s new $430 million fund for crypto-related investments. She also wrote about Protagonist’s $100 million fund, also focused on crypto.
- Rebecca Szkutak covered Conscience VC, interviewing Ariana Thacker about her firm that invested in consumer companies with a science edge.
- Catherine Shu reported on C2 Ventures’ second $20 million fund targeting startups disrupting legacy industries.
- Manish Singh featured Lightspeed Venture Partners’ new India and Southeast Asia fund, which has $500 million in commitments. That fund is part of a group of four across the startup lifecycle that Lightspeed announced Tuesday for a total of $7 billion.
- Paul Sawers covered Cathay Innovation’s third fund, with $1.05 billion in capital commitments.
Here’s a roundup a some others from my inbox:
- Bloomberg Beta announced its fourth $75 million fund and also a new $75 million opportunity fund for later-stage checks into startups the firm has already backed.
- Ben Narasin’s Tenacity closed its debut fund with $50 million in capital commitments. The firm says it plans to write checks of between $1 million and $3 million into pre-Series A rounds of companies both in the U.S. and in the U.K.
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