Eniac Ventures has closed two funds totaling $220 million in seed-stage companies to share exclusively with TechCrunch.
New York-based Eniac raised $60 million in Select 1 and $160 million in Eniac VI, the company's vehicle for subsequent late-stage investments in portfolio companies. The firm has made 11 investments since Select 1, which were actually closed in 2021 but have not been made public until now. Co-founder and general partner Nihal Mehta said the firm plans to make its first investment from its sixth fund “soon.” Both funds plan to make approximately 40 investments in total.
For new investments, Eniac's average check size is $1.5 million. Subsequent checks are typically larger, Mehta said, with the largest check invested by Select Funds being $6 million.
Eniac is a sector-agnostic company, with Mehta describing the team as “generalists before product-market fit.” Despite being sector agnostic, even Eniac has been plagued by the artificial intelligence bug, with Mehta noting that “machine learning and AI have been major themes” for the company over the past decade.
“While there is some hype around AI, we believe this is the most transformative wave of computing we have seen since the Internet,” he said.
Portfolio companies include 1up Health, Alloy, Anchor, Attentive, Brightwheel, Embrace, Ghost, Hinge, Hive, Level.ai, Maestro, Owlet, and Vungle. Eniac is also an early investor in Airbnb and other companies such as TapCommerce (to Twitter), Anchor (to Spotify), Dubsmash (to Reddit), Hinge (to IAC), Workflow (to Apple), and Vungle (to Blackstone). I have seen the withdrawal of ) and Vence (to Merck Animal Health).
Mehta did not name specific LPs, only that they are a mix of “top foundations, endowments, pensions and funds of funds” and that the majority are “mission-driven.” Stated.
Despite the challenging funding environment, Mehta said the funding was “ironically the fastest” Eniac had raised in 15 years.
“We attribute this success to the returns we've been able to get from multiple funds over the past few years,” he told TechCrunch, declining to provide specific return numbers.
Eniac's funding size has increased significantly over the years. Eniac raised his first $1.5 million fund in 2010, his fourth fund in 2017 with his $100 million, and another $125 million in 2021. Raised as his Eniac Fund V. Over the years, the company has supported over 250 of his startups.