Announcing SoftTech VC III’s final close at $55M

All of us at SoftTech are super excited to share that we reached a critical milestone for our firm: we have wrapped up our third fund, SoftTech VC III. Back in January 2011 we announced Fund III, with an initial $35M target, then increased it to $50M and at investors’ demand, agreed to bump it up to $55M before closing it, oversubscribed. We can also – finally – talk about it since we’re no longer fund raising and aren’t subject to non-sollicitation restrictions any more – yeah! So why raise $55M, when our second fund was $15M? I learned a lot investing Fund II from 2007 to 2010, and figured that even for seed funds, outsized returns are generated by having the right level of ownership, and a meaningful level of follow-on participation, in your portfolio companies. We therefore upgraded our strategy from Access (“get in the good deals”) to Ownership (“buy/keep enough of each company that any positive outcome is meaningful to the fund”). We now have an initial bite size of $400K (sometimes a bit less, sometimes a lot more) and will selectively invest our pro-rata, or buy up, in follow-on rounds of  companies that are scaling well…. Read More »