SEC Filing Indicates Brad Feld’s Foundry Group May Raise $750 Million For Its Biggest Fund Yet

It seems like every week now there’s news of some new venture capital fund raising mountains of cash from limited partners. Crunchbase News has covered this phenomenon generally, and specific cases involving new funds from Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Caerus Ventures, Sky9 Capital, and others.

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Today fills out this week’s expectations with a regulatory filing from Foundry Group, the Boulder, CO-based venture capital firm founded by Brad Feld, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson.

According to an SEC form posted early this afternoon, Foundry Group intends to raise as much as $750 million for a new investment fund for a new vehicle called “Foundry Group Next 2018, L.P.” The filing indicates that no money has been closed yet.

Foundry Group declined to comment.

If the fund closes at its anticipated size, it would be Foundry Group’s seventh and largest fund to date. Below, you’ll be able to find a chart displaying the size of Foundry Group’s funds to date. It includes the proposed Next 2018 fund for scale.

If Foundry Group’s new $750 million fund is closed, it would bring up the firm’s total capital raised to $2.35 billion.

If the name of this fund is anything to go off of, this seventh fund appears to be a successor to the firm’s sixth, a $500 million fund closed in September 2016 called “Foundry Group Next, L.P.” According to a post on the firm’s blog, and a TechCrunch article from the time, Foundry Group Next would serve as a growth-stage fund to make follow-on investments in the firm’s prior portfolio companies as well as make investments in other late-stage companies that fit the firm’s thematic thesis.

In the earlier-linked corporate blog post, Foundry Group partners welcomed Lindel Eakman to the team. They said that “Lindel was previously our largest LP while he was at UTIMCO and is now leading our Foundry Group Next investments as an LP in other early stage VC funds.” Over the past month, Foundry Group announced investments in two new “Partner Funds“:

• Seattle-based PSL Ventures, which Crunchbase News covered at the time of its launch in April.
• Toronto-based Golden Ventures, a seed-stage VC fund. Foundry Group invested in the firm’s third fund, a CA$72 million vehicle.

Additional firms in the partner funds network include Union Square Ventures, True Ventures, Founder Collective, and Homebrew, among others.

Considering that Foundry Group has been fairly consistent with its naming, there’s good reason to believe the 2018 edition of the Next Fund will follow a similar, diversified strategy of investing. Between growth stage companies and modest investments in other firms to bring them into Foundry Group’s network of partner funds, there’s little doubt that they’ll find some way to commit three-quarters of a billion dollars.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias