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Ignition Partners Raises $200 Million Fund VIIgnition Partners today announced Ignition Venture Partners VI ("Fund VI"), a new $200 million fund focused on early-stage enterprise software investments. During the fundraising process, Ignition experienced strong demand for Fund VI, receiving more than $300 million in interest from a small group of endowments, foundations, fund of funds and family offices. The firm chose to stick to its core "boutique" investment model, predominantly targeting a small number of Series A startups. Fund VI is led by managing partners Frank Artale, John Connors, and Nick Sturiale and an investment team working out of its offices in Palo Alto, CA (News - Alert) and Bellevue, WA. The firm anticipates investing Fund VI in domain areas such as mobile first enterprise, industrial Internet infrastructure, and cloud-delivered vertical and horizontal productivity services. "In a world where 'big' gets the attention, we embrace the notion of being an 'anti-scale' venture firm. We leverage our presence being in Palo Alto (News - Alert) and both Amazon and Microsoft's back yard coupled with our outsized devotion to a small number of entrepreneurial teams to help generate differential outcomes," said Nick Sturiale. "As ell, part of our model is to work with a core group of world-class LPs, whose support is instrumental helping guide our investment thesis on what will likely be a notable vintage of new market-making companies." In the last three years, Ignition funds realized more than $800 million in liquidity from its portfolio companies with over 25 significant exits that include the IPO of Splunk and acquisitions of portfolio companies Azaleos, Parse, Topsy, Tier3, Whiptail and Zenprise (News - Alert). Other portfolio companies that include Bromium, Chef, Cloudera, Docusign, Motif and Xamarin witnessed strong investor demand while raising significant later-stage financings. Fund V, raised in early 2013, was approximately $160 million in size. In the last two years, Ignition has made investments in companies that include Azuqua, BlueData, Nymi, Trifacta, StrongLoop, Tempered Networks, Tellwise, Tipbit, Unidesk and wit.ai, which was recently acquired by Facebook (News - Alert). A couple of Fund V investments are unannounced and remain in stealth mode. "We are excited to partner with Ignition on their newest fund," said Tom Gladden, partner at Adams Street Partners, investors in Fund VI. "We believe their team is very well positioned to invest in the top management teams in the enterprise software sector." About Ignition Ignition Partners helps entrepreneurs build innovative, category-defining businesses of lasting value. The firm, with offices in Bellevue, Wash. and Palo Alto, Calif., specializes in early-stage investments in "consumerized" enterprise IT, cloud computing and big data. For more information, visit www.ignitionpartners.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150521005278/en/ |
