Social Capital Teardown

Social Capital is a VC fund with a focus on healthcare and education. However, its portfolio is expansive, encompassing consumer, fintech, and enterprise software startups, as well as its core focus areas. Social Capital has emphasized its mission-driven nature, making explicit its intention to advance technology and companies that will help solve global inequality and unevenly distributed opportunities.

The Palo Alto-based firm was co-founded by Chamath Palihapitiya, formerly VP of Growth at Facebook, Mamoon Hamid, formerly a partner at US Venture Partners (USVP), Ted Maidenberg, also formerly of USVP, and Brigette Lau, formerly an IBM client executive. Alongside the contributions from the firm’s LPs, all four have invested a significant stake of their personal wealth in the firm’s success.

Since launching their first fund in 2011, Social Capital has raised approximately $1.2B across 3 funds, participated in roughly 207 deals to 131 companies, and invested in several unicorn startups ($1B+ valuation), including Slack, Flatiron Health, SurveyMonkey, Box and Yammer (as of 7/3/17).

Given Social Capital’s unique investment strategy, active exit history, and high-profile investments, we decided to dig into their investment portfolio, co-investors, and exit history.

Notes:

1. Where’s the data & viz from? 100% of the visualizations and data you see in this teardown are directly from the CB Insights platform and its Investor Analytics tool.
2. What’s a Teardown? A product teardown is the act of disassembling a product to understand its parts, functionality, etc. An investor teardown is analogous in that we’re trying to understand a firm by analyzing data around their financing strategy, investment thesis, key people, exit history, investment syndicates, and more.

*This analysis does not include Social Capital’s funds managed independently from the main funds such as their investment in the Slack Fund, Social Capital’s hedge fund, or the recently launched Growth fund.

We’ll discuss trends and highlights in Social Capital’s portfolio over the past few years by analyzing the following dimensions:

• Strategy and vision
• Financing activity
• Exit activity
• Fund size
• Industry heatmap
• Deal size
• New vs. follow-on
• Financing by stage
• Investment syndicates

Strategy and vision

Social Capital has taken a functionally agnostic view of capital allocation, meaning their investments cut across various industries, and also range in structure, size, and stage. Their goal, however, is always to help breakthrough companies in healthcare, education, financial services, consumer, enterprise software, and frontier tech that could have a long-term transformative impact.

“Our mission is to advance humanity by solving the world’s hardest problems.” – Chamath Palihapitiya

Industries like education and healthcare are considered difficult and underserved due to the long-term return on investment, capital-intensive start-up costs, regulatory uncertainty, and perceived early-stage risk.

Social Capital has consistently invested in these verticals and has been among the most active investors in digital health and ed tech. Social Capital’s strategy has been to invest in companies in the early stages and maintain reserves for follow-on investments as needed. In part to balance the longer-term return horizon on these investments, Social Capital has also made strategic bets in enterprise software, and several of these have already paid off.

“We founded Social Capital in 2011 and built a strong early stage investment practice, with a focus on Series A deals. Now we’re six years in, and we’ve come to believe that venture capital isn’t, in itself, a strategy. While early stage investing continues to be a critical part of our business, in order to have the global impact we seek, we need to be stage agnostic and work with entrepreneurs across their company’s entire lifecycle.

“We started down this road by first formalizing our practice around company incubations. This had been something we were doing successfully on an ad hoc basis for years. This team (called Discover) is led by Jay Zaveri, and conducts research, ideation and incubations, with a focus on hard problems that we don’t see being addressed in our venture pipeline. We’re also significantly expanding our seed investing program, an effort quarterbacked by Arjun Sethi.” – Chamath Palihapitiya

In addition to the investment team, Social Capital has a discovery team, an incubation program that is supported by Social Capital team members, and a platform team dedicated to leveraging technology and data science to support the investment team and portfolio companies.

Social Capital launched a public fund in May 2016, Social Capital Public Equity Partners, signaling an expansion beyond venture into growth stage investments. At the helm as CEO of Social Capital Growth is recently appointed Tony Bates, formerly President at GoPro. The expansion into growth supports Social Capital’s mission to invest across a company’s lifecycle from incubation through to public investing.

“On the other end of the capital spectrum, we recently announced that Tony Bates (of Cisco, Skype, Microsoft and GoPro fame) has joined to lead our Growth investing practice. Additionally, we’ve been investing in public equities since the launch of our public hedge fund in May 2016. We had been investing in public equities with our own money for several years prior, which gave us conviction that we could apply a long-term mentality to public investing, just as we do in our private investing efforts.

“Over time, you can expect us to continue to add products to this suite of capital capabilities as long as we believe it is additive to the choices an entrepreneur has in scaling their company.

“Beyond our capabilities around capital, our true long term differentiation is our Platform. The majority of the Platform team are product managers, data scientists and engineers, and include some of the key people that helped scale Facebook.  Now, this Platform team is what enables us to scale capital allocation across company stages as well as engage with our portfolio companies to help them operate better. We’ve all seen how companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon have leveraged their data to transform their respective industries, but this hasn’t really happened for startups or in the organizations that invest in startups in any meaningful, large scale way. It’s early days, but the Platform team (led by Ray Ko, who ran Growth with me at Facebook) is ingesting massive amounts of first and third party data, doing machine learning, and building tools that help us learn about how companies grow at all points in their lifecycle. We then use these learnings to not only make better investment decisions but also help our portfolio companies operate better. This has been so successful that the Platform team will embed themselves directly with our portfolio companies for periods of time to help them navigate different phases of their growth (learning more about growth themselves in the process).”  – Chamath Palihapitiya

Financing activity

Since officially launching in 2011, Social Capital has participated in 207 equity investments totaling $2.99B (as of 7/1/17). In 2016, Social Capital participated in 37 deals totaling approximately $717.7M in financing, a record in terms of funding from Social Capital-backed deals. Deals were just shy of the record set in 2013, which saw 38 investments worth approximately $332.7M in financing.

In 2016, Social Capital did not stray from their stated strategy. Approximately 60% of deals were in early-stage companies. These included new forays into VR (Kite & Lightning), machine learning (Groq inc.), and drones (Saildrone and Airmap). The remainder of deals were to mid- and late-stage companies, primarily in each of Social Capital’s core investment sectors.

• Healthcare: Syapse is a software suite for healthcare systems to implement precision medicine programs, streamline operations, and improve clinical outcomes. Social Capital has participated in all rounds of funding to Syapse to date totaling approximately $38M. Syapse‘s latest investment was a $25M Series C in Q1’16 that also included participation from Ascension Ventures, GE Ventures, and Safeguard Scientifics. Social Capital also invested in $2.5M seed round to Sempre Health, software that collects disparate patient data to calculate a risk adjusted price of healthcare at the individual level.
• Education: Guild Education is an education and training platform for working adults that provides individual courses and degree programs. Social Capital participated in an $8.5M Series A that included Cowboy Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.
• Financial services: CommonBond is a marketplace lending platform for student loan financing. Social Capital participated in a $30M Series C investment that included August Capital, Nelnet, Neuberger Berman, Nyca Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, and Victory Park Capital. Social Capital previously participated in CommonBond’s Series A and B (and a debt financing), along with other investors. CommonBond has raised $471.5M in disclosed funding to date.
• Enterprise: Slack is enterprise software for collaborating and messaging and is Social Capital’s highest valued unexited portfolio company.

“We invested in Slack after my partner, Ted Maidenberg, introduced me to Stewart Butterfield. Ted and Stewart were both on the Cozy board (another Social Capital investment), and we first met with Stewart about Slack in October 2013, when there were just a handful of companies, including Cozy, using the Slack beta. We checked in again in January 2014 to get some early findings. Slack was still pretty small at that point – fewer than 10,000 total users – but thanks to our earlier investment in Yammer, which had been acquired by Microsoft in 2012, it was clear that there was something really special going on with this product. DAU/MAU (daily active users & monthly active users) and conversion to paid accounts were both off the charts compared to Yammer by multiples of 5X and 3X respectively. And Slack was able to charge 4X as much for its service.

Zooming out, investors and entrepreneurs alike tend to focus on metrics like MRR (monthly recurring revenue) when talking about and evaluating SaaS products, but that can be deceptive, since revenue is a lagging indicator of potential. When thinking about companies like Slack, Intercom and Front (all investments), we tend to look at “north star” metrics that are tied to engagement, not revenue, which have given us the conviction to take large early (and subsequent) bets. We love software companies that delight users and become core parts of their everyday workflows, and we see Slack, Intercom and Front as crucial parts of the stack that will absorb, improve and significantly expand communication that has traditionally happened over email.” – Mamoon Hamid

Social Capital participated in Slack’s latest round of funding, a $200M Series F that valued the company at $3.8B. The round also included Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, GGV Capital, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, and Thrive Capital. This was the largest round Social Capital backed in 2016. Social Capital also participated in the company’s Series C, D, and E investments, which combined with the Series F totaled $523M in disclosed funding.

• Consumer: Forge is a social network for the online gaming community. Social Capital participated in a $4.5M Series A in Q2’16 that included participation from True Ventures, NZXT, Resolute Ventures, and WME Ventures.
• Frontier: As mentioned, this is a recent area of focus for Social Capital and included a $14M Series A investment in Q3’16 to Saildrone which builds sailing drones to collect maritime data. The investment also included participation from Capricorn Investment Group and Lux Capital.

“Saildrone is a really remarkable company. In short, it’s building a fleet of autonomous sailing drones that traverse the ocean to collect planetary data. The CEO, Richard Jenkins, spent a decade (successfully) breaking the world land speed record, and the “wing” he developed later informed the sail design of today’s drones. Saildrone isn’t just a cool passion project — there’s vast commercial demand and potential for the planetary data collected by the drones’ sensor banks, ranging from information on fish populations to weather data. Research vessels cost up to $100K per day to operate. Saildrone can deploy its vessels on long range, autonomous missions at a small fraction of that price. And there’s a lot of exploring to do — amazingly, we know less about our own oceans than we do space. You can think of Saildrone as a ‘SpaceX for the oceans.’

Zooming out a bit, Saildrone is a great example of a newer category of investment for us: frontier. We’re increasingly investing in hard, non-obvious, large markets that span satellites, climate, space and machine learning. We’re entering uncharted territory with many of these investments, but we benefit from the thesis-driven work and learnings from our Discover team when it comes to understanding new areas. Including Saildrone, we made five frontier investments in 2016, most of them still stealth.” – Ted Maidenberg

Below is a graph of Social Capital’s monthly investment participation from their profile on CB Insights.

Exit activity

One year after launching their first fund, Social Capital had their first exit: Yammer, which was acquired by Microsoft at a $1.2B valuation in 2012. While most new venture funds would still be fundraising, Social Capital had already seen its first unicorn exit.

Yammer is an enterprise collaboration platform and was Social Capital’s second portfolio company. Social Capital participated in a $25M Series C investment in Q4’10, a deal that predates the official launch of the fund. They followed on in a $17M Series D investment in Q3’11 and a $85M Series E investment in Q1’12. Yammer was acquired the following quarter.

Social Capital’s exits include 1 IPO and 19 mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The data highlighted below details some of Social Capital’s exits to-date.

• Cloud-storage software company Box went public with a $1.67B valuation in January 2015. It is Social Capital’s largest exit to date and their only IPO. Social Capital invested in the Series E and F rounds.
• Scan, a developer of image recognition and QR code scanning applications, was acquired by Snap in September 2014 at a $50M valuation.
• Expense management website Lemon Wallet was acquired by Lifelock in December 2013 at a $42.6M valuation.
• P2P tutoring website InstaEU was acquired by Chegg in June 2014 at a $30M valuation.
• One of Social Capital’s latest exits was the acquisition of Coolan by Salesforce in Q3’16. Social Capital participated in the company’s seed investment in Q1’15.
• Not all of Social Capital’s investments have been successful: Social Capital has had 4 portfolio companies shut down, HomeHero, Better, Scout Launcher, and Sprig.
• HomeHero was an on-demand hiring platform for caregivers; Better was a digital health concierge and platform for health records that was co-founded by Chamath Palihapitiya; Scout Launcher was a mobile app that customized curated content for mobile users; and Sprig was an on-demand food delivery service.

The firm’s recent exits with their disclosed valuations are plotted on the below scatterplot taken from Social Capital’s CB Insights profile.

Fund size

Social Capital is currently investing out of its third fund worth $600M. This is the firm’s largest fund to-date. The firm’s first fund was estimated at $275M and the second was estimated at $325M.

The $600M is a substantial sum for an early stage fund, yet is in tune with Social Capital’s strategy of participating in follow-on deals at the Series A and beyond.

Social Capital launched their first fund in 2011, with a mix of private and personal funding. Their first reported investment was a $1M seed investment to Glooko, a digital platform to monitor and manage diabetes, in Q4’10.

“Glooko is a great example of how grueling and rewarding it can be to invest in companies tackling truly hard problems. Glooko was started by Chamath, one of our LPs (Sunny Madra), and a well known investor in Silicon Valley, Yogen Dalal.  Each of them had been meaningfully affected by diabetes and wanted to do something about it. But building a healthcare company is hard. There are regulatory hurdles, patient trials, and extremely long negotiations and sales cycles with pharma companies and hospitals. Plus, you really have to earn the trust of your customer, the patient. There were several moments when Glooko could have gone out of business with multiple issues with the FDA and almost running out of money, but we kept writing checks, and now, six years in, they’re the world’s leading diabetes management solution, with a clear path to becoming a very large, very important company (and now with plenty of investor interest). To make these kinds of early investments, you have to have a ton of patience and conviction (it helps to be a little crazy), and you also have to make sure your portfolio is balanced with faster-growing consumer and enterprise companies that give you the space to invest in the Glookos of the world without getting afraid.” – Ted Maidenberg

Chamath Palihapitiya co-founded Glooko and is personally invested in helping battle the disease. Social Capital followed-on in all additional rounds including a Series A, B, and C; the company has raised $71M in disclosed funding to-date. Glooko has also been actively partnering with companies like pharmaceutical provider Novo Nordisk and glucometer developer Ascensia to advance digital diabetes management and make the technology more accessible.

Apart from their main fund, Social Capital has also partnered with Slack, their portfolio company, as well as other top VC investors like Accel, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Spark Capital to advise on the Slack Fund. The $80M fund is focused on investing in enterprise software technology that is built on top of Slack. Additionally, Social Capital recently launched a public fund, mentioned above, but has not disclosed any funding information.

Industry heatmap

Looking at the industry heatmap shows the majority of Social Capital’s portfolio is focused in the internet sector. Comparing their investment portfolio by industry in 3-year increments, we can see that while they have remained concentrated in the internet sector, they have increased their investments to companies in mobile and telecommunications. Mobile and telecommunications make up the second-largest sector in their portfolio.

The industry heatmap below shows the distribution of investments by sector for 2011-2013 on the left and 2014-2017 YTD on the right. The size of the box represents the number of deals and the darkness of the blue represents total funding.

Within the internet sector, broken down on the left, below, investments were focused in software and services across several categories as well as business intelligence-focused ventures.

• Education and training:
  Brilliant Worldwide is an internet-based global education community specializing in mathematics and science. Social Capital participated in a $3M Series A in Q3’12 that included 500 Startups.

“Investing in education startups requires patient capital and conviction. Silicon Valley has fallen in love with fast growth and seemingly overnight unicorn status, but the path is often much more complicated for ed tech entrepreneurs. For example, if you’re selling into schools, you’re invariably hampered by a slow sales cycle. And there’s typically a lot of work to do upfront to educate people about the benefits that technology can bring to their lives or the lives of their students. Furthermore, education does not stop at schools. We are all lifelong learners, and the vision is to build the ecosystem to support the ever-changing needs of students and the workforce. But as uphill as the road can be, working with ed tech founders is incredibly rewarding. You won’t find a more passionate or mission-driven group of entrepreneurs. And for those that do break through, the impact they can have is profound. After all, the greatest asset in the world is human capital.

One of the most interesting challenges in this space is balancing an entrepreneur’s vision of the future, and a business model that can scale. Brilliant, for example, has built a community of more than 4 million students, educators and enthusiasts who come together to work on math and science problems. The founder, Sue Khim, knows that fully gating the community and building a company entirely on subscription revenue would cut off the people Brilliant seeks to help — the most brilliant children and young adults who might not otherwise have access to great education or educators. So instead, Sue and her team have invested in building a vibrant community that’s open to all, and they’re now focusing on surfacing the best and brightest talent to top employers, with some exciting early traction. This is the kind of creativity, dedication and thoughtfulness that working in this space requires.” -Brigette Lau

• Business intelligence, analytics, and performance: Netskope is a cloud access security broker (CASB) that monitors and provisions access to cloud applications. Social Capital participated in a $100M Series E in Q2’17 that included Accel Partners, Geodesic Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sapphire Ventures. Social Capital previously participated in all of the company’s previous rounds of funding, which, including the Series E, amount to approximately $221M in disclosed funding. Mamoon Hamid is a member of the board.
• Health and wellness: Simplee is a payments platform for healthcare expenses from pre-service to billing to financing. Social Capital participated in a $20M Series C that included 83North, American Express Ventures, and Heritage Group. Social Capital previously participated in the company’s Series A and Series B investments and Ted Maidenberg is a member of the board.
• Healthcare: NeuroTrack Technologies helps diagnose and treat cognitive and mental health-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Social Capital participated in a $6.5M Series B investment that included Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Rethink Impact, and AME Cloud Ventures. Social Capital previously participated in their Series A. Flatiron Health, a healthcare technology company and operator of the OncologyCloud platform, is one of Social Capital’s most valued companies with a $1.2B valuation. Social Capital participated in an $8M Series A investment that included BoxGroup, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, IA Ventures, Social Capital and SV Angel.

Within the mobile sector, broken down on the right below, investments are primarily in the software and services sector across health and wellness, healthcare, and education and training focused ventures. Below are a few highlights from each sector.

• Health and wellness (mobile): Glooko, mentioned above, raised an $8M Series C investment that included Canaan Partners and Samsung Ventures.

• Healthcare (mobile): Propeller Health is a digital health platform to track and monitor respiratory health. Social Capital participated in a $21.5M Series C investment that included 3M New Ventures, SR One, Hikma Ventures, and Safeguard Scientifics. Social Capital previously participated in the company’s Series A and Series B investments and Ted Maidenberg is a member of the board.

• Education and training (mobile): Remind is a mobile communications platform that connects teachers, students, and parents. Social Capital participated in a $40M Series C investment that included Kleiner Perkins and First Round Capital. Social Capital previously participated in the company’s Series A and Series B investments and Chamath Palihapitiya is a member of the board.

Deal size

The chart below shows Social Capital’s average and median deal sizes by quarter.

The chart reveals that the median size of rounds with Social Capital’s participation have ranged between $1M – $25M, with spikes driven by large late-stage investments. Median deal zone has mostly been between $5M – $10M. Both median deal size and average deal size dipped in Q1’17 driven by an uptick in new early-stage deals, which we’ll discuss further in the next section. Q2’17 saw both trend upward, with a spike in average deal size driven by a mega-round ($100M+) investment to Netskope, mentioned above.

The average deal size is less consistent and ranged between $1M – $45M. The largest spike was in Q4’14 and can be attributed to Social Capital’s participation in two late-stage investments. Social Capital participated in Slack’s $120M Series D investment and participated in a $64M Series D investment to robo-advisory firm Wealthfront. 2014 was generally a strong year for SaaS company valuations and round sizes, as later-stage investments surged.

Average deal size spiked again in Q2’16, which can be attributed to a $200M Series F investment in Slack and a $160M Series C in Clover Health. The median deal size is the better metric to focus on over time, and this has generally remained in the $5 to $10M range.

Social Capital has made 19 investments in H1’17, the largest of which was the $100M Series E to Netskope mentioned above. The largest investment in Q1’17 was a $12M Series D-II to media and news company Bustle, which recently acquired Elite Daily and will rebrand the site as Bustle Media Group. Social Capital has participated in all previous rounds of funding.

Using the CB Insights’ Business Social Graph tool (BSG), we visualized Social Capital’s investments in 2017 YTD.

New vs. follow-on

As Social Capital’s portfolio has matured, follow-on investments (investments in companies in which Social Capital has already invested) have fluctuated. 

During Q1’12-Q4’13, new investments accounted for more than 50% of all investments which is common for a newer fund. During this period, Social Capital did between 4-9 new deals each quarter. Then in Q1’14 Social Capital participated in 6 follow-investments, more than any quarter prior, and these follow-ons accounted for 55% of total deals that quarter. This was also the first time follow-on investments accounted for a greater share of deals than new investments. The shift was driven by several mid-stage (Series B and Series C) investments, which also caused the spike in the median and average deal size analyzed above. Social Capital continued to make more follow-on investments than new investments until Q4’15, when deals were again split evenly between follow-on and new investments.

Q4’15 was generally a slow quarter for Social Capital, perhaps as it geared up to deploy capital once more after announcing its $600M fund in May of 2015. To date, Q4’15 remains the slowest quarter in terms of numbers of deals.

Social Capital quickly rebounded in Q1’16, more than doubling deals through a mix of new investments in early-stage companies and follow-on investments. New deals accounted for approximately 56% in Q1’6 and continued to make up the majority of quarterly investments through Q4’16. Social Capital continued the upward trend in new deals, which accounted for 64% in Q2’17.

Again, the focus for new investments is in the early stage; Clover Health, a data-driven health insurance provider, is the only new investment in 2016 that was not an early-stage deal.

Below is a screenshot from the Investor Analytics tab on CB Insights showing the percentage of new investments to follow-on on a quarterly basis from Q1’12 to Q2’17.

Financing by stage

Approximately 60% of Social Capital’s investments over the past 5 years have been in early-stage companies seeking seed/angel or Series A deals. The firm has made a few later stage investments including in Series D and Series E+ rounds but, to-date only as a follow-on investment. As the firm expands into growth investing, that composition may change.

Consistent with Social Capital’s early-stage investment strategy, the share of deals has been consistently concentrated in the early stages, especially in the firm’s early years. As Social Capital made more consistent follow-on investments during Q1’14-Q3’15, the share of deals shifted slightly from early-stage to mid-stage deals, which also caused a spike in the average deal size analyzed above.

In the last year, as Social Capital increased the pace of new investments, the share of deals by stage shifted back to the early stages, with seed/angel and Series A making up approximately 40% and 21%, respectively, of total investments.

Below is a look at trends in round participation from the last 5 years and reflects the shift towards mid-stage deals mentioned above.

Investment syndicate analysis

Unsurprisingly, Social Capital is frequently involved in deals that are tied to other smart money investors as well as top corporate and corporate venture capital (CVC) firms. With the exception of Foundry Fund, Social Capital has co-invested in at least 1 deal with all of the other top investors on our 24-investor smart money VC list.

Invested before Social Capital

Y Combinator, an accelerator that makes seed-stage investments in tech companies, has been the largest source of deal flow for Social Capital, having invested in 7 companies prior to Social Capital. Social Capital also sees some of its deal flow from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, and CRV, which have all invested in 5 companies at an earlier stage than Social Capital.

Y Combinator invested ahead of Social Capital in enterprise software provider Front and Wi-Fi infrastructure provider Wifi.com.ng. Andreessen Horowitz invested ahead of Social Capital in Box, Social Capital’s only IPO, and also in unexited unicorn Slack. Greylock invested ahead of Social Capital in Imperium, a cybersecurity software provider that was acquired by Google, and most recently in ClearSlide, a sales enablement software provider. CRV invested ahead of Social Capital in Wave, an expense management fintech startup, and 3 of Social Capital’s exited companies including, Yammer, Breakthrough Analytics, and Imperium.

Co-invested with Social Capital

Social Capital most often invests alongside Graph Ventures having joint investments in 14 deals with 13 companies. The two funds recently invested in a $4M Series A to Ripple, an internet news platform. The two funds also participated in a $4M seed investment to Jetty, a tech-enabled property and casualty (P&C) insurance provider, that competes with Google Ventures-backed Lemonade. Social Capital also often invests alongside top CVC Google Ventures, having joint investments in 17 deals to 12 companies. The two funds most recently co-invested in LotusFlare, a mobile internet platform that creates affordable global access to the internet. Social Capital and Google Ventures participated in the company’s $4M seed investment in Q2’14 and both followed on in a $6M Series A in Q3’15.

Social Capital also frequently co-invests with Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, and CRV which were Social Capital’s top sources of deal flow referenced above.

Invested after Social Capital

Social Capital’s portfolio has a few early winners in growing sectors but is largely comprised of companies that align with Social Capital’s mission to invest in healthcare, ed tech, and financial inclusion. Perhaps for this reason, not many investors have been consistent follow-on investors.

“I take this as a sign that we’re investing in the right things. There are many in the venture world who would rather invest in the tenth version of something that worked than take a chance on something new and important. But Silicon Valley is in a position to take on really hard global problems, ranging from chronic disease to the future of jobs to climate change. Given our current global political and economic climate, I’d argue our attention to these issues is more important than ever before. We need more allocators of capital willing to venture outside their comfort zones, and we need to change the narrative of success in the Valley so that the next brilliant aspiring entrepreneur has the courage and encouragement to go after something hard.” – Chamath Palihapitiya

Google Ventures is the most active follow-on investor to Social Capital’s early bets and has invested in 4 of Social Capital’s portfolio companies. Follow-on investments include participating in a $130M Series B investment in Flatiron Health, a $81M Series C investment in Collective Health,  a $2.1M seed investment to Wifi.com.ng, and a $1.5M seed tranche in Space Monkey, enterprise software that monitors cloud storage that was acquired by Vivint. Second place is a tie between 7 investors all of which invested in 2 of Social Capital’s portfolio companies.

The tables below show some of the investors that Social Capital often invests in before, after, or alongside, and was taken from the Investor Analytics tab on CB Insights.

Notes:

100% of the visualizations in this Teardown are from Investor Analytics. No MS Excel necessary.

Visualizations on the platform are all interactive so you can click and see underlying transaction details.

Visit Social Capital’s profile to check out these visualizations on your own.