Industry | Venture Capital |
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Founded | 2011 |
Founder |
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Headquarters | , |
Key people |
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Website | initialized |
Initialized Capital is a venture capital fund founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian, Harjeet Taggar, and Garry Tan. [1]
As of 2021, it has raised more than $3.2 billion in assets. [2] [3] Initialized Capital has 23 portfolio companies it invested in at seed that have since become unicorns, including Coinbase, Ro, Cruise Automation, Instacart, Flexport, Opendoor, Algolia, Goat Group, Rippling, Truepill, and CoinTracker. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Initialized raised $7 million in its first fund. In February 2012, it filed its Form D notice of exempt offering of securities.[ citation needed ] It raised $39 million in its second fund in August 2013. [8]
In 2013, Initialized Capital became an early investor in Coinbase, wiring the cryptocurrency app's founder Brian Armstrong $200,000. [9] Garry Tan left Y Combinator in 2015 to focus on Initialized full time. [9]
On June 7, 2016, the firm announced a $100M target for its third fund and then closed $125 million. [10]
In late 2018, it raised a $225 million fund, the company's fourth. [2] [11]
In June 2020, Ohanian ended his role as Managing Partner at Initialized. [12]
In August 2020, the firm raised $230 million, the company's fifth round. [12]
In December 2021, Initialized Capital completed its sixth funding round, raising $700 million to invest in startups. [3]
In August 2022, it was announced that Garry Tan would be stepping back to re-join Y Combinator as CEO. [13] Jen Wolf and Brett Gibson have taken over leadership of the firm in Tan's absence. [14]
Garry Tan has been listed on the Forbes Midas List from 2018-2022. [15] [16] [17] [18]
Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth continues to be managed by co-founder John Fisher and co-founders Mark Bailey, Randy Glein, and Barry Schuler.
Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
The Forbes Midas list is the annual ranking by Forbes magazine of the most influential and best-performing venture capital investors. Described by Kara Swisher as the "Oscars for venture capitalists in tech," the Midas List uses parameters that include the first-day market capitalization of IPOs and the opinions of a panel of experts.
Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has invested in a number of companies and raised approximately $5.6 billion. Index Venture partners appear frequently on Forbes’ Midas List of the top tech investors in Europe and Israel.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management, with $42 billion as of May 2024.
FirstMark is a Venture capital firm based in New York City. FirstMark invests in early-stage technology companies, frequently as the first institutional investor and leading the rounds it participates in. Notable investments include Airbnb, Pinterest, Shopify, DraftKings, Stubhub, Upwork, and Ro.
Peter Fenton is an American venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a venture capital firm. Fenton has steadily worked his way up the Forbes Midas List of the 100 top technology investors, starting at no. 94 in 2007, then rising to no. 62 in 2008 and no. 50 in 2009. Fenton was ranked no. 4 when Forbes resumed publishing its Midas List in 2011 and was described as the "most productive venture capitalist on our list". In 2012, Fenton was ranked no. 5 on the Forbes Midas List and was no. 2 in 2015. He has been a perennial member on the Midas List since 2007.
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the world's largest venture capital firms.
Alexis Kerry Ohanian is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is best known as the co-founder and former executive chairman of the social media site Reddit along with Steve Huffman and Aaron Swartz. He also co-founded the early-stage venture capital firm Initialized Capital, helped launch the travel search website Hipmunk, and started the social enterprise Breadpig. He was also a partner at Y Combinator.
StartX is a non-profit startup accelerator and founder community associated with Stanford University.
Uncork Capital is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California, founded by Jeff Clavier. Considered one of the most active established seed funds in Silicon Valley, it has invested in companies such as Postmates, Eventbrite, Fitbit, and SendGrid.
Spark Capital is a venture capital firm in the United States which specializes in funding early-stage startups of consumer, commerce, FinTech, software, frontier, and media sectors. It has branches in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City.
Qasar Younis is a Pakistani American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and the CEO of Applied Intuition, a technology company that is building advanced software and infrastructure tools for self-driving vehicles. Prior to Applied Intuition, he was the COO of Y Combinator during Sam Altman’s tenure as President. He was also the co-founder and CEO of Talkbin.
Garry Tan is an American venture capitalist and executive who is the CEO of Y Combinator and a founder of Initialized Capital. He previously co-founded Posterous and Posthaven. He was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, and previously a partner at Y Combinator. Tan is also known for his engagement in San Francisco politics, both as a commenter on social media and as a political donor.
Founders Circle Capital is an American growth capital firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founders Circle Capital invests in private companies and specializes in growth stage investments providing preferred stock and common stock purchases, institutional liquidity and other unique structures to founders and long-term employees.
Theresia Gouw is an entrepreneur and venture capital investor in the technology sector. She worked at Bain & Company, Release Software and Accel Partners before co-founding Aspect Ventures, a female-led venture capital firm, in 2014. Gouw was named one of the 40 most influential minds in tech by Time Magazine. and has been recognized seven times on the Forbes Midas List as one of the "world's smartest tech investors". According to Forbes, Gouw is the richest female venture capitalist, with a net worth of approximately $500 million, primarily due to her involvement with Accel (company)'s early investment in Facebook.
DCM (also known as DCM Ventures) is a venture capital firm located in Silicon Valley, Tokyo and Beijing. DCM was one of the first venture capital firms to invest in the early-stage technology sector in China, beginning in 1999. It has increasingly shifted away from Chinese investments due to US sanctions against China.
Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital. He previously was partner at Social Capital and served as an executive at Yahoo! where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Before that, he was co-founder and CEO of MessageMe and he was CEO of Lolapps, the developer behind Ravenwood Fair. In December 2023, he became Tribe Capital's chairman and CIO.
Pantera Capital is an American hedge fund and venture capital firm focused on digital assets headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The fund specializes in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. It is one of the largest digital asset funds in the world by managed assets.
Pear VC is a seed-stage venture firm based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson in 2013. Pear VC works with early-stage companies. The company was originally based in Palo Alto, California before relocating to Menlo Park.