Foundation Capital, an early backer of Solana and Cerebras, raises $600M fund

Foundation Capital has come a long way since it was forced to scale down its fund size from $750 million in 2008 to $282 million (its sixth main fund) in 2013. On Tuesday, the 30-year-old firm announced that it raised a $600 million eleventh flagship fund, which is 20% larger than the predecessor $500 million fund it closed about three years ago. Foundation credits its revival with sticking to its knitting: seed-stage investing. “Most firms that have been around for 30 years have typically gone multi-stage, multi-geography, multi-strategy. We instead have stayed very focused on the early stage,” general partner Steve Vassallo told TechCrunch. Foundation is the first institutional investor in over 70% of its portfolio companies. “We look for what I call ‘$0 billion’ markets in enterprise, AI, fintech and crypto,” Vassallo said. “These are markets that don’t even exist until founders will them into being.” He explained that when Cerebras launched in 2016, from Foundation Capital’s ... Read full article.