Susa Ventures, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based, seed-stage venture firm, has closed on two new funds, a $90 million early-stage fund — its third flagship fund — along with its first opportunity fund, to which investors committed $50 million.
Though young, Susa has some very fast-growing companies in its portfolio, which surely smoothed the fundraising process. (It also explains why the firm has already raised a separate to vehicle that will support its breakout portfolio companies.) It has participated across all five funding rounds to date of the six-year-old, freight logistics company Flexport, which was last valued by its backers at a $3.2 valuation.
Susa was also there at the start for the commission-free trading company Robinhood, backing the company at its seed, Series A, and Series B rounds. (Robinhood has subsequently raised two more rounds of funding and was valued by investors during its most recent round, which closed last year, at $5.6 billion.)
And Susa was early to Andela, the software developer training and outsourcing company that announced a $100 million Series D round in January that brought its total funding to $180 million.
Susa’s general partners include Chad Byers, who is the son of Brook Byers, a founding member of Kleiner Perkins; Leo Polovetz, who spent years as a software engineer at LinkedIn, Google, and Factual before becoming an investor; and Seth Berman, who was previously the VP of marketing at the luxury goods company Richemont.
A fourth, founding general partner, Eva Ho, left the firm in 2016 to cofound as separate venture firm, Fika Ventures in L.A.
Part of Susa’s $50 million includes $2 million that it carved out for the founders in its portfolio, capital that it is not charging them to manage and any profits from which will go entirely to the founders. The firm says more than 40 individuals participated in the parallel fund.
Some of Susa’s most recent checks have gone to Troops, a four-year-old, New York-based startup that helps sales teams communicate with a customer relationship management tool that plugs into Slack; STORD, a 3.5-year-old, Atlanta-based “next-generation” warehousing and distribution company; and Scope AR, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based maker of AR tools designed for complex remote tasks, employee training, product and equipment assembly, maintenance and repair, field and customer support.
The firm has written more about its new fund here.
