Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Fairhaven finishes fundraising at $250M for new fund

Fairhaven Capital has closed a $250 million venture capital fund, which it will use to invest in early-stage companies in the areas of high-performance materials and digital media infrastructure.

About one fifth of the total sum is already invested in an existing portfolio of five companies, said co-founder Paul Ciriello. The Cambridge-based firm plans to include a total of 20 to 25 companies in the portfolio covered by the fund, which it has christened “Fairhaven Capital Partners.”

The fund, which Fairhaven began raising about one year ago, exceeded its original goal of $200 million, Ciriello said.

“As a first order we are market investors,” he said. “We spend time up-front. We call this our market-based approach to investing, trying to divine what we think will be the major market-based dynamics in a certain industry.”

In 2007, Ciriello and co-founder Jim Goldinger spun Fairhaven Capital out of TD Capital Ventures, a firm they founded with Rick Grinnell in 2000.

The fund is seeking to invest in enterprise technology companies “that deliver high levels of service at low cost,” Ciriello said.

The current Fairhaven Capital Partners portfolio includes the Cambridge-based data storage company Dataupia Corp.; Cambridge-based Podzinger Corp., makers of the video search engine EveryZing; and Colorado-based Cocona Fabrics. The fifth company in the Fairhaven portfolio is Xtranormal, a Montreal-based digital animation company founded by Richard Szalwinski, who also founded Softimage Co. and Discreet Logic Inc.