Venture capital power Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) firm has raised another fund. The firm raised $350 million as its twelfth funds. DFJ is interested in autonomous transportation, digital health, enterprise transformation, and artificial intelligence.
One of the oldest venture capital firm, DFJ focused its investment on early-and growth-stage investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. Founded in 1985 by trio Timothy Draper, John Fisher and Steve Jurvetson, hence the acronym DFJ came from. The firm has been on the frontline of many technology advancements, including on Elon Musk's SpaceX and Tesla.
This week, DFJ announced to raise its 12th fund of $350 million, which according to Steve Jurvetson as cited by Geek Wire, "With this new fund, we will be looking to make seed and early-stage investments in trailblazing, purpose-driven entrepreneurs with ideas that have the potential to reinvent entire industries."
The fund will be used as for early stage investment in disruptive technologies as the firm is well-known for that kind of investment. This fund was raised in over two months from six partners of DFJ venture team: William Bryant, Steve Jurvetson, Emily Melton, Bubba Murarka, Andreas Stavropoulos, and Josh B. Stein. The firm has also growth team consist of five partners
One of the DFJ partners, William Bryant told Geek Wire that he will be looking to invest his portion of the $350 million fund in Seattle startups. He wanted to actively build on the firm's existing and historic portfolio in Seattle.
DFJ has been the investor of Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX, the first Elon Musk company in the Series D funding in 2012 raising $30 million and in Series C and Series D for Tesla. Other than that, DFJ has also invested in Foursquare, Coinbase, SugarCRM and PlanetLabs.
Forbes reported that DFJ favors highly technical and highly ambitious ideas, such as synthetic biology, quantum computing, driverless cars, and artificial intelligence fields. That is the main reason the Menlo Park-based venture capital firm made an investment in SpaceX.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 to build a space transport vehicle, allowing a rocket to be built once and used multiple times for space travel. The company has successfully built two rockets: Falcon orbital launch vehicle and Dragon 9 spacecraft.
For its bold investment in SpaceX, TechCrunch reported DFJ accepted an award on behalf of SpaceX at last night's annual Crunchies awards ceremony. The company won for the category of best technology achievement for its two-stage rocket, the Falcon 9, which was designed to transport satellites and SpaceX's own Dragon spacecraft into orbit.
Now, with its new $350 million fund, DFJ will seek to invest in a highly technical and ambitious startup companies. Such investment which the firm has been doing for more than 30 years.
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