Investing In Talent Over TAM | Africa’s VC Boom | $510 Million For Supply Chain

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The community, now some 550 people strong, serves as a key component of Neo, Partovi’s venture capital shop, which on Friday closed its second fund after raising $150 million. Few of the four-year-old firm’s investments so far have been in startups founded by students in the network (that plan has a longer timeframe), but Partovi is similarly investing in companies for their people rather than their ideas — the same philosophy that led him, back in his angel investing days, to help bankroll Mark Zuckerberg and Drew Houston.

People first: While every VC will tell you that the strength of a company’s founding team is an important factor when deciding which companies to invest in, firms like Neo take that to a new level by having the entrepreneur as the core strategy. Neo isn’t alone in this pursuit. The firm joins a small — but growing — number of investors who are choosing to focus their deployment strategy on talent over TAM and finding success doing so...

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“I started getting an idea of where the world is going,” Susan tells Midas Touch. “I decided to go and share with [venture capitalists] what I was seeing in the field of supply chain and by and large I got the cold shoulder.” So he launched Eclipse in 2015 to help build and invest in the companies that play a role in this digitization which would transform analog data into a masterlist of actionable information cross-referencing every aspect of the supply chain. Susan compiled a team of operators from notable companies in their respective industries like Tesla, Microsoft, Samsara and others. Susan was right about the impending transformation. The market has grown so much since the firm’s founding that it is now announcing a new fund to add to its strategy. 

The fund: The Palo Alto-based firm raised $510 million for its first early growth fund. This new fund will invest in Series B and Series C rounds into new companies for the firm as well as in follow-on rounds from the existing portfolio — something the firm was already doing through special purpose vehicles. “It’s also our first attempt to invite companies that we didn’t do in the early stage  — that are still great companies — to come and work with us because they still want our operating background,” he says. The fund compliments the firm’s main early-stage flagship fund which raised $500 million earlier this year and brings the firm’s AUM to $2.3 billion...

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