Boston-Area VCs Close Their Largest Funds Yet

Boston is one of the top markets in the country for startups raising venture capital, and it is also a hot market for VCs raising funds of their own.

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In the past few days, two of the Boston area’s most active venture investors revealed new funds.

OpenView’s Fifth Fund

A recent regulatory filing shows that OpenView has raised $296.75 million for its fifth venture fund. The initial regulatory filing for the same fund indicated a target fund size of $250 million, meaning that OpenView was able to attract more capital for its fund than it initially anticipated. Available data in Crunchbase and in searchable SEC filings indicates that Fund V is OpenView’s largest fund closed to date.

OpenView’s portfolio includes a number of companies which Crunchbase News has covered since the start of the year, including:

• Visual testing platform Applitools, which raised a Series C round in April.
• Back-office integrator Pipefy, which closed a Series A round in March.
• Loopio, a SaaS tool for managing the proposal request process, which raised its Series A round in February.

So far, in 2018, OpenView has one reported exit: the acquisition of Socrata by Tyler Technologies, which was announced in April. Although terms of the pending deal weren’t disclosed, the Dallas Business Journal reported Socrata took in $25 million in revenue in its most recent fiscal year.

OpenView declined to comment on the new fund.

CRV Announces Fund XVII

CRV, a 48-year-old venture capital firm formerly known as Charles River Ventures, announced a new $600 million fund late last week. It is CRV’s seventeenth venture fund, and it is the largest one to date according to available data from Crunchbase and the SEC.

Although CRV has been an early-stage investor, its new fund carries “an additional mandate” to invest in growth-stage technology companies. In other words, capital in this new fund is allocated to both early-stage investments and later-stage investments in companies from CRV’s portfolio and select rounds in companies it otherwise hasn’t invested in before. If that strategy sounds at all familiar, it’s because it’s becoming a more common trend. Crunchbase News recently discussed a filing for a $750 million investment vehicle being raised by Foundry Group. That fund also has an inter-firm growth investing component to its strategy.

CRV has offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Boston. Its name refers to the Charles River, which runs through Boston.

Other Boston Notables

There are a few other Boston-based venture firms that have made the news so far in 2018. Here are some of the highlights:

• One Way Ventures, a $16.3 million seed fund which specializes in investing in immigrant founders, has announced 2018 investments in Sentenai, Edwin, and LovePop. The firm was co-founded by former TechStars Boston leadership Semyon Dukach and Eveline Buchatskiy in 2017.
• Elephant Partners, which was co-founded by Warby Parker co-founder Andrew Hunt, announced its second fund, a $250 million capital pool, in March.
• Carmichael Roberts, one of Boston’s all-too-few black venture capitalists, told the Boston Globe he intends to close at least $100 million for his new Material Impact Fund.

Although the Boston metro area may not be quite as active as Silicon Valley or its neighbor New York, it remains one of the U.S.’s leading innovation hubs. Investors in the area continue to raise more to seize upon opportunities, both local and elsewhere.

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