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Atlas Venture is cutting back its team of IT investors after closing its eighth fund well short of its original target.
Boston-based Ahmet Ozalp and London-based Martin Gibson will leave the firm, a spokesman said today. Partners Eric Hjerpe and Barry Fidelman, both based in Boston, will take venture partner roles. The move leaves only Boston-based partners Jeffrey Andrews, Axel Bichara and Jeff Fagnan on Atlas’ team of partners investing in the technology space.
In a press release today, Atlas announced the promotion of Bruce Booth to partner in its life sciences group. Booth currently holds board seats with portfolio companies Ivrea Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Zafgen Inc., and is chairman and co-founder of miRagen Therapeutics Inc.
“I think one of the things we heard from the marketplace was a need to concentrate capital in the hands of fewer investing partners,” Fagnan said in an interview Thursday. “We wanted to put capital into the most experienced hands, and then we wanted to optimize by skill set.”
Hjerpe, who joined the firm in 2005 and invested in two companies in its fund VII, said the feeling was mutual. “Both the investing partners and myself felt it was a better situation to move to a venture role.”
The staffing news came along with an announcement that the firm closed Atlas Venture VIII at $285 million. According to U.S. Securities and Exchange documents, the firm had originally valued the fund at $400 million.
Fagnan declined to disclose the firm’s internal rate of return (IRR) for its seventh fund, but said it is an “upper quartile fund,” in rankings maintained by Thomson Reuters and Cambridge Associates.
The release named existing limited partners Kisco Management, the Kresge Foundation and Paul Capital, as well as new LPs Franklin Park, Industriens Pensionsforsikring A/S and Meketa Investment Group as investors in the closed fund.
The Waltham-based firm also disclosed that its first investment out of Atlas Venture VIII was a $7.4 million Series A for the cloud computing software company CloudSwitch Inc. That investment was originally announced earlier this week.
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