Announcing Audacious 2.0: Our $150M second fund
MZ, Sam and I are excited to announce Audacious' second fund, a $150M pre-seed and seed stage fund dedicated to backing the most ambitious founders in the world at the earliest stages of their journey.
Audacious was founded in April 2020. We've intentionally kept a low profile so far, but today we're ready to unveil a bit more of our history and ethos!
Prior to Audacious, I spent a decade investing at Lightspeed and Battery Ventures. Over that decade, some of the companies I backed include: People.ai, Gainsight, Multiverse, BuildingConnected, WorkOS, 6Sense and Marketo, amongst several others.
My biggest learning in the decade before founding Audacious was simple: Ultimately, startup success comes down to A+ teams and large markets. As VCs, we overestimate our ability to predict where the world is heading and underestimate how much it comes down to outlier people doing outlier things.
Accordingly, at Audacious, we focus on two jobs:
Invest in force of nature founders,
Help them recruit an A+ team.
Then, we get out of the way. There's obviously a lot more nuance and detail behind that statement but yes, that's Audacious in a nutshell.
Since our inception, we've backed companies across the B2B landscape: AI, healthcare, construction, horizontal sales/marketing/recruiting tools, fintech, and climate tech. Many of our investments are still in stealth mode, but some of the known ones include: Vartana, Tome, WorkOS, Multiverse, Suppli, Quadrant Health, Jamix, Flint, Planette, Bestever, Scoop and Ignition.
At Audacious Ventures, we've fused a seed stage venture firm and a recruiting firm together. In a team of 6 people today, half of us are investors and the other half are recruiters. But unlike most VC talent teams, we actually run searches for our portfolio; we don't just advise on how to hire or which recruiting firms to use.
In the three years since we started investing, we've recruited 36 people to our portfolio companies, and assisted our founders with many, many other recruiting efforts. We focus on three roles: engineering, sales, and marketing. Our portfolio companies get a dedicated recruiting effort to fill their pipeline with A+ candidates across these three functions as soon as they're ready to expand their teams.
Founders: Our goal at Audacious Ventures is to be the most impactful investor in your cap table. We don't take board seats, and we think VC advice is overrated. Our ethos is simple: Move the needle in helping you build an A+ team around you, then get out of your way.
If the above resonates with you and your ambition is to build the next great enterprise software company, we'd LOVE to talk to you!
