Tim Chen, a solo VC for his company Essence VC, said he had just shut down his fourth fund. The limited partner investors were very enthusiastic about investing, and they prevailed that, he told TechCrunch. He didn't even have time to generate a pitch deck.
In this era of billion-dollar ventures and solo VCs like Jack Altman (who just raised the second Giants Fund for $275 million), a $41 million salary increase may not sound much. But that's mostly because Chen didn't want to take on more. This is a startup from Chen's 2022 third fund $27 million (up from his $5 million and $1 million first fund).
Chen had not started a new fundraiser. Because until last month he was still investing from his third fund. However, after his second round, one of Tabular's portfolio companies was acquired in 2024 for around $2.2 billion, limited partner investors began whispering about him.
“It basically almost returned our entire fund,” Chen told TechCrunch, putting him “on the map” as he explained. Suddenly, LPS was hearing his name everywhere. Founder cites his advice on the cap table mentioned by other VCS. They wanted it.
Partly because Chen specializes in developer tools and infrastructure startups at the earliest stages, a segment that is becoming more popular in this era of AI.
Chen cut his teeth as a software engineer and earned street credits from then on as one of the earliest employees of Mesophere, a one-time hot open source cloud infrastructure startup supported by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft. He then co-founded an AIOPS startup called Hyper Pilot and sold it in 2018 to Cloudera as an acquisition and employment.
In 2019, Chen began investing in Angels and found that he has the knack for other deep technical startups like Jasper, Flat File and Mother Duck. “I really enjoyed it. The founder kept me loving and talking to all my friends.”
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025
Looking for a new career, he thought ventures were that, so he interviewed several Big Sand Hill Road companies.
“No one wanted to hire me,” he said. “I'm an engineer and a small founder. I don't think that's a typical profile.”
His friend Jake Zeller (and currently on the go with his own fund), who worked for Angelist, told Chen not to give up and spoke to him to launch his own funds on the platform.
“He told me, 'Tim, I think you can raise $1 million and try it out,” I said, 'I didn't know that it was possible,' Chen recalls, and through the introduction Chen landed an LP like Bain Capital.
Andreessen Horowitz's well-known infrastructure and AI investor Martin Casado appeared as a later LP of funds. And then, longtime funding investor at Sendana Capital, Michael Kim, invested. After Tabular was sold, Kim told him that Sendana had already booked $15 million for the fourth fund. Chen was shocked.
He was also receiving calls from others, who were former investors such as sapphire, general catalysts, new individuals, and more. “I wasn't a fundraiser. I had no idea how much I could raise. It was like a development and atmosphere,” he said.
When Stepstone pushed him to send him an LP document, they could hand out the money and when they wanted to take someone else, he chose to collect his actions and immediately fund them. Angellist essentially did his fundraising document for him. He settled into a reasonable conflict from his final fund and moved with caution as he still considers him a beginner in the venture.
Fund IV supporters were shrieked, including names such as Tomasz Tunguz (former Redpoint partner, now a theory venture) and Ethan Kruzweil (former Bessemer partner, now a chemical VC partner).
He believes in the growing reputation for his background as an infrastructure engineer. “There are very few VCs that look like me,” referring to his deep technical background using software infrastructure.
It wasn't appealing to large companies, but it was a boon to his solo investment. Rather than focusing on the traction and sales funnel, a typical VC helps early founders understand how to build their products.
For example, he invested in a company called Comfyui, who at the time worked on consumer visual AI products based on a stable, open source spreading model. After the investment, Chen advised the founders to become the model developer platform.
Comfy-Org has raised a $17 million Series A to compete with the large closed source model manufacturer. And their blog posts publicly thank Chen for helping them develop their strategy.