Contour Venture Partners, a longtime New York-based seed investor, is making progress with its latest flagship fund.
The company closed on Contour Venture Partners Fund V with $42 million raised from 64 backers, according to a May 17 SEC filing. The company is targeting $90 million for its fifth flagship fund and began raising money in May last year, according to filings. Say. The company previously raised $20 million of this as part of a separate parallel fund, according to a December filing.
Contour Venture Partners declined to comment.
The past few years have been tough for venture funds looking to raise new vehicles. Over the past year, VCs such as DCVC, Tiger Global and Founders Fund have also lowered their fundraising expectations. Venture funding fell more than 50% last year compared to a record year in 2022, according to PitchBook data.
Contour prefers to write checks between $500,000 and $1.5 million and lead rounds for seed and early-stage companies. The company focuses on areas such as SaaS, digital media, and financial services, with a preference for companies based in New York or the Northeast.
While Contour doesn't have the financial backbone of some seed companies, it has built a track record of investing in solid companies.
The company was one of the first to invest in cloud analytics platform DataDog in 2011, and the company went public in 2019 at a valuation of $7.8 billion. Contour invested in OnDeck, a financial platform specializing in loans, in 2006, which has struggled in recent years, but made a notable exit in 2014 when it went public at a valuation of $1.3 billion. .
Contour's active portfolio includes product intelligence platform Pendo, which has raised more than $460 million in venture funding to date at a final valuation of $2.6 billion. The company is also an investor in content personalization startup Movable Ink, which has raised nearly $100 million to date and was last valued at his $1.3 billion.
The nearly 20-year-old firm has raised more than $370 million since its founding in 2005 through four flagship funds and three opportunity funds. The company is still led by its two founding partners, Matt Gorlin and Bob Green.
Correction: This article and its headline have been updated to reflect the existence of a parallel $20 million fund that counts as part of the original $90 million that Contour planned to raise.