Bring Capital, one of the more prolific and well-connected seed VC firms, has secured an additional $270 million for its new fourth flagship fund. Bling general partner Kyle Lui told TechCrunch that about half of these new millions will go toward opportunity funding, which is money set aside to make additional investments in winners. It is said that it will be done.
Bling was founded in 2018 by Ben Ling, a former general partner at Khosla Ventures who backed companies like GitLab and Webflow. He earned his Valley Street credentials through executive positions at Google, YouTube, and Facebook. He has also become a very successful angel investor (Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, etc.), so it's clear that seed investing is his calling.
These experiences shaped his VC firm. The company runs the Product Council, a network of leaders from major tech companies who help Bring advise startups. With this new fund, the firm's network adds advisors from notable startups such as Notion, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Stripe to its roster.
All told, Lin has about 19 unicorns under his wing. Lui, previously a partner at DCM, has acquired at least seven unicorn companies, including names like DocSend and Hims.
In six years, Bling has already invested in 170 companies, including companies such as Rippling and Vice. The new fund isn't a huge step up from its last fund, which was launched about two years ago. That amount totaled $212 million, which was also split roughly evenly between new seed funds and opportunity funds.