Hadley Harris

Feb 9, 2021

Eniac Ventures, a seed company specializing in New York startups, announces its fifth fund totaling $ 125 million. Eniac’s four general partners – Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Vic Singh and Tim Young – have invested together for more than ten years and have known each other for even longer, after meeting for the first time at the University of Pennsylvania. . Singh described the company as “one of the GOs” in the early stage investment, while Mehta said, “Consistency has been our superpower.” Eniac’s fund size has grown significantly over the past decade, from its first fund of $ 1.6 million in 2010 to its fourth fund of $ 100 million in 2017. However, Mehta said that the The team had approached the last fund with $ 125 million as both a goal and a goal. rigid cap. “ The larger funds allow Eniac to make more investments and lead rounds as the definition of a start-up agreement has broadened. (The firm says it can invest $ 350,000 to $ 3 million in a single round.) At the same time, GP Hadley Harris stressed that Eniac will remain focused on seed deals rather than on Series A, and wants to stay “really collaborative, so we never need to take more than half the turn.” General Eniac partners typically only make two or three investments per year, which Harris says is “well below the average seed fund.” “We always want to be the benchmark investor in the companies in which we invest, by leading or co-leading these cycles,” he continued. “And we want to have the necessary bandwidth to partner with them in the early stages of their journey. We believe that the only way to achieve this is through concentration. “ Eniac’s portfolio now includes more than 120 companies, with more than 50 exits. Recent successes include mobile messaging company Attentive (which raised $ 230 million in Series D last fall), podcasting startup Anchor (acquired by Spotify) and online retailer Boxed (which s recently partnered with one of Asia’s largest physical companies, Aeon). While Eniac initially marketed itself as a mobile-focused company, it now invests in software as a service, development platforms, consumers and cutting edge technologies. Harris said they don’t point to specific industries or trends they’re focusing on because, “We want to be balanced between theses and opportunists … Theses that we tend to focus on tend to be. per partner basis and change quite quickly. The company is headquartered in New York and an office in San Francisco. Hadley said New York-based startups remain a priority, while at the same time, “we also believe great founders can be anywhere and we’re increasingly interested in distributed teams.” Singh added that despite the hype around other emerging startup hubs, “A lot of the founders we partner with in New York City remain in New York. They haven’t left. They can hire team members elsewhere, he said, but there is a high bar for remote employees. And if a startup wants to be fully distributed, “first you have to be fully remote and distributed. You cannot be distributed later; you have to build the organization in this way very intentionally from the start. “ As for the longevity of the team, I noted that it also has a potential downside from a diversity perspective, especially since the four founding GPs are men. However, the company recently promoted two other team members – vice president of finance and operations Anna Nitschke and investor Kristin McDonald – who Singh noted “the votes on the deals with us” and “feels as if she has a say in how the business is run. “And the firm plans to hire six new members this year. If you want to learn more about the company’s partners, I’ll interview them on Superpeer (another recent investment from Eniac) tomorrow, February 10, at 2:30 p.m. EST.