The fundraising environment has been tough for emerging managers, defined as venture capital firms raising capital for the first to third time.
But Katie Jacobs Stanton, the former Twitter media chief who founded Moxie Ventures in 2019, said raising a third round of funding was much easier than she expected.
Moxxie, which invests in pre-seed and seed-stage startups, announced Tuesday that it has closed its third fund on $95 million, beating its target of $85 million.
When the company began raising funds, Stanton and general partner Alex Rotter, a former senior vice president of engineering at Twitter, told limited partners they didn't intend to start allocating capital until 2025. Luckily, the company's limited partners, which include fund-of-funds Cendana Capital and Accolade Partners, the Nature Conservancy, outsourced CIO Global Endowment Management and several universities, were eager to back the company. Cendana founder Michael Kim described Stanton's network as one of the deepest and broadest of seed-stage investors.
“It didn't take as long as I thought it would to raise the funds, so I'm really happy, but you never know what's going to happen,” Stanton said.
While the five-year-old company has yet to secure a meaningful investment, Stanton's track record of personal investments prior to Moxie through #Angels, an investment collective she co-founded with other female Twitter executives and former Twitter employees, is indicative of her investment acumen. Previous investments include Karuta, Coinbase and Airtable.
Moxie's portfolio companies have had modest success so far: Asked to name a few, Stanton cited startups like Certn, the identity verification company that raised an $80 million Series B last year, and Spellbook, the legal contract writing AI copilot that raised a $20 million Series A in January led by Innovia.
Moxie is named after a synonym for courage with the addition of an X, which represents the female chromosome. The firm has made it its mission to invest in underrepresented founders since it launched a $25 million fund. Currently, about one-third of the firm's portfolio companies are led by female founders, and about half were founded by Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), according to Stanton.
While the firm considers itself a generalist investor, it has a penchant for backing companies in healthtech, climatetech, SaaS and AI applications, and has recently invested in several robotics startups, including Jacobi Robotics, which is developing AI-powered motion planning technology. Moxxie's average investment is $1.5 million, and the firm aims to take around 10% stake in each startup at its initial investment.
Stanton, who served in the Obama administration during its first term, continues to be vocal about politics, the 2024 presidential election and how venture capitalists can become more public about their political leanings.
She said the current political transparency in the investment community is a good thing: in a world where capital is still a commodity, it helps founders decide who to back because it shows “who can add value, who has values.”