Sean O’Sullivan, the director of the global venture wear SOSV , has slowly but steadily built up a sizable operation over the years.
SOSV started off as a family office, investing the capital of O’Sullivan after he cofounded two companies, including MapInfo, an outfit that went public in 1994 before Pitney Bowes it years later, in 2007. The seed-stage investing outfit went on to raise three more funds, including a < a href="https://medium.com/sosv-accelerator-vc/sosv-raises-277-million-in-oversubscribed-fourth-fund-to-invest-in-early-stage-deep-tech-startups-264bfffa7dc3"> $277 million early-stage fund that it closed off 2019 and is actively investing from right now.
Now, to complement those funds, the organization has raised $547 million for what it’s deemingnaming a Select Fund, a vehicle getting rid of help SOSV maintain its seasoned pro rata stake in some of its breakaway portfolio companies.
On account of other tools in the market, SOSV wasn’t completely hamstrung up to now. Instead, SOSV has, from time to time, assembled a special purpose venue to re-invest in certain of your respective startups it has backed. Yet O’Sullivan says these were practically small SPVs — experience $2 million in size and / or maybe less. The new fund, he says, is expected to write bank checks of between $2 100 thousands and $5 million properly as up to $10 million — or 10% of the pay for, per SOSV’s agreement featuring a investors.
Of course, the new fund also can bring startups even more reason to work alongside SOSV, which tends to make its seed checks to make sure you first-time founders, who O’Sullivan observes are often overlooked — wrongly — by of several in favor of repeat founders.
He points to Piece of fruit, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and simply Alibaba, noting that landscape designs would look rather so many different without them. He says experienced the entire phenomenon himself when he cofounded a company (NetCentric) after MapInfo. “People were just lining up to invest, ” he says. “It was so easy to raise typically funds without anything apart from a business plan, and these days and nights, you don’t even need one. ”
This does not mean SOSV will get mainly because big a bite as it can certainly like in every deal. Despite the fact that SOSV has enjoyed advancement by betting on new entrepreneurs — it was one of the primary investors in FormLabs, for example , a company now valued at $2 billion; it also supported JUMP, the bike-share medical that Uber acquired appearing in 2018 — a $321.88 million fund is trivial by current standards. SOSV could well find itself top against players that have vast amounts of dollars to deploy as well which are writing bigger check to younger companies, additional rapidly than ever.
It’s not an absurd dread, agrees O’Sullivan. He says definitely saw some sharp hand just this week, in fact. Some of a $100 million-plus process was coming together, such as firm that O’Sullivan diminished to mention didn’t want to make bed room for the startup’s Series V or A investors because it i thought i’d meet a certain equity patience.
O’Sullivan according to the earlier investors acquiesced. (“They’re giving us a multi-billion valuation” and also “trying to be able to secondaries from existing huge number of investors, ” he explains, plus adding that SOSV would undoubtedly generally prefer to hold its very own shares through an IPO. )
Still, raam anand suggests there’s no need to regarding SOSV. While the earlier throughout the world went with the flow, O’Sullivan says that in “most cases, there’s enough to go around for the previous investors. ” He also calls the vehicle “good protocol for the late-stage investors [to make room] if they want to continue to have got us introducing deals in their mind. ”
Fit another way, smaller fund or not, SOSV has a kind of assistance, too.
