BBG Ventures, a now eight-year-old, New York-based seed- and early-stage enterprise agency that solely backs founding groups which function at the least one girl, simply locked down $50 million in capital for its third fund, a significant leap over its first two funds, each sized at $10 million.
One figuring out issue within the larger fund is that BBGV, previously backed completely by AOL (now Verizon Media), now has a broader pool of institutional and particular person buyers, together with the State of Michigan Retirement Systems, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and Verizon Ventures, together with Poshmark cofounder Tracy Sun, ClassPass cofounder Payal Kadakia, and enterprise capitalists Aileen Lee, Theresia Gouw, and Jennifer Fonstad.
The younger agency additionally has a observe document to which to level. Though an funding within the coworking area The Wing might have taken an surprising flip, damage by a nationwide lockdown and inside turmoil, different bets have been rising, together with the e-commerce platform Zola; the female hygiene model Lola; and Spring Health, a psychological well being advantages platform for employers that not too long ago closed on $76 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global Management.
That’s saying nothing of the huge and underserved alternative to spend money on women-led groups that BBGV’s founders, Susan Lyne and Nisha Dua, imagine most enterprise corporations nonetheless don’t absolutely recognize.
We talked earlier immediately about why that’s with Lyne, who’s a former ABC president, former Martha Stewart Living CEO and former CEO of AOL Brand Group; and Dua, who’s a former lawyer, administration advisor, chief of workers to Lyne, and founder. Our dialog has been edited for size.
TC You’ve raised $50 million. What dimension checks will you be writing? Are you trying to take larger positions or do you’ve gotten a extra numerous strategy?
ND: We’re taking a look at writing $500,000 to $1 million checks. We search for 7.5% to 10% possession, and we’re open to co-leading, however we desire to steer. We’ve been main rounds already with this with this fund. We’ll probably do about 30 firms from the fund, backing a mixture of pre-seed and seed-stage startups, with reserves for follow-on funding.
SL: We’ve really completed 11 investments; we began investing after the primary shut.
TC: You’ve invested in almost 80 startups over time. What has been your largest funding so far?
ND: Planet Forward, which was based by Zume cofounder Julia Collins.
TC: Have you — or would you — ever kind a particular objective automobile to take a position extra in a startup than your fund allows?
SL: We didn’t do it for our final funds, however we did our first SPV for this fund, in an organization referred to as Starface, which is skincare firm that takes a really totally different strategy to the pimples downside. You’ve in all probability seen the gold stars [that its customers apply to their pimples] on social media. They’ve been rising very quick and did a Series A not too long ago and we took a part of it ourselves however we additionally opened an SPV for one in all our LPs.
TC: What themes curiosity you proper now?
SL: We’ve completed quite a lot of investing to this point in well being and effectively being. That’s our largest class. The second is the way forward for work and training; the third is climate-friendly commerce; and the fourth is basically underestimated, or rising shoppers. In all of these areas, now we have really discovered there are numerous, many, many feminine founders who’re energetic and constructing nice firms
ND: Also, we [have historically] described ourselves as a client fund, however we’re doing extra B2B on this fund, the place we expect that the B2B strategy may clear up an even bigger client downside, together with for a lot of hundreds of thousands of shoppers.
TC: What’s an instance of what you imply?
SL: Grayce, which is doing eldercare and really promoting to employers as an worker profit. If you take a look at the fee to firms due to the variety of hours and days that many individuals spend money on caring for an ageing mother or father or making an attempt to determine what the following step is for them [you recognize the…
