San Francisco and Woodside, CA-based Walden Venture Capital closed its eight fund at $107m.
Walden Venture Capital VIII was supported by private investors and has also been accepted by the Small Business Administration’s new Early Stage SBIC program, which provides capital from the US Government directly to the fund in the form of leverage.
With the SBA’s commitment, the fund is focused on early stage US-based companies.
Founded in 1974, Walden makes investments in digital media and cloud services startups (in infrastructure, services and content for consumers and enterprises, including mobility, productivity, social, advertising, search, games, music, eCommerce, etc.) whose seed has “sprouted” to demonstrate customer traction or innovative technology. It has a product-centric approach to deal screening, requiring a demo of the product or technology before taking meetings.
Led by Managing Directors Larry Marcus, Matt Miller, and Art Berliner; and Venture Partners Bill McDonagh and George Sarlo, and newly added Associate Ms. Aditi Rajaram, the firm usually acts as a lead investor, writing $1-4M initial checks in priced rounds that are typically $3-5M in size, reserving capital for follow-on rounds.
The fund targets 20-25 investments over its lifecycle.
Past investments included Gymboree, Niku, Vitalstream, Pandora, SoundHound, Aarki and Blue Lithium among others.
FinSMEs
04/02/2015