True Ventures Announces $635M For Two New Funds

Roughly four and a half months after filing its initial paperwork with the SEC, True Ventures (an investor in Peloton, Fitbit, Ring, Blue Bottle Coffee, and many others) announced that it had raised $635 million across two new funds.

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In a blog post, founding managing partner Jon Callaghan wrote that True Ventures secured $350 million for True Ventures VI and $285 million for True Ventures Select Fund III.

Either way, Fund VI is True’s largest primary fund to date. But let’s see how that compared to the firm’s initial summer filings.

In mid-June, Crunchbase News broke the story that True Ventures was raising a pair of new funds, which we first spotted in SEC filings. At the time, it appeared that True Ventures was targeting $325 million for its sixth flagship fund1 and another $325 million for its third growth-stage follow-on fund. 2

That’s $650 million in total, more than the $635 million announced today. So which fund took the haircut? Not Fund VI, which managed to raise $25 million more than initially intended. Coming in at $285 million instead of its targeted $325 million, True Ventures Select Fund III came in $40 million underweight. At least, that’s if you compare what was initially targeted to what was ultimately announced.

As we acknowledged in the initial story, though, targets are subject to change for all sorts of reasons. Given a surge in seed and early-stage funding worldwide throughout Q3 2018, when True Ventures was raising its new funds, it makes sense that the firm could garner slightly more interest for its early-stage vehicle.

However, late-stage deal volume hit new highs, and Q3 dollar volume grew by 76 percent from the same period in 2017. It’s not like the bottom is falling out of late-stage deals (not yet anyways), so raising 12 percent less than originally intended for a later-stage fund is notable.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias