Boldstart Ventures started off with $1 million in 2010 as a kind of experiment. Boldstart, founded by longtime VC Ed Sim closed its third fund with $47 million.
Among Boldstart's newest bets is Kustomer, a year-old, New York-based platform that enables brands to keep track of and increase engagement with their customers. (In September, the company revealed that it has now raised $12.5 million to date.) Boldstart also wrote one of the earliest checks to HYPR, a two-and-half-year-old, New York-based startup that helps companies deploy secure password-less experiences for their employees through fingerprint, voice, face and eye recognition. It announced $3 million in seed funding last month.
Indeed, while most seed-stage firms of the same age are still waiting on their first exits, Boldstart has seen six from that first, very small fund, including the sale of Rapportive to LinkedIn in 2012; Divide's sale to Google in 2014; GoInstant's sale to Salesforce in 2012; and Blaze Software's sale to Akamai in 2012.
Boldstart has another 29 startups in its second fund. None has exited yet, but many have raised substantial follow-on funding, including SecurityScorecard, a three-year-old, New York-based security startup that helps its customers predict and remediate potential security risks and earlier this year raised $20 million in Series B funding led by GV.
There are new fund and about emerging shifts that Boldstart is watching. The biggest, he said - boring as it may sound - is simply the early adoption of cloud for enterprises.
"We talk with a lot of buyers who've been using the cloud for either developer platforms or new projects but are now exploring how to move their legacy systems. It's still early, but there's a groundswell building, and that's opening up a ton of opportunities around how to better manage and secure data and how to help developers be more productive. "
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