Tuesday, February 21, 2012

NextView Ventures closes on 1st micro-VC fund

By Kyle Alspach, Boston Business Journal

NextView Ventures, a micro-VC firm in Boston, has closed on its first venture fund at $21 million, the firm said Tuesday.

NextView plans to invest between $250,000 and $500,000 in seed rounds for software and web startups, while also and reserving capital for follow-on rounds, NextView partner Lee Hower said in a blog post.

“The model’s working well so far but we know it’s very early days and the bulk of the hard work is ahead of us,” Hower wrote.

NextView launched in mid-2010 and consists of Rob Go (formerly of Spark Capital), David Beisel (formerly of Venrock) and Hower (formerly of Point Judith Capital). In April 2011, NextView raised $8.1 million toward its first fund then targeted at a top end of $25 million instead of the $21 million it closed at.

The firm has made 15 investments to date, Beisel said in an e-mail. Investments have included Boston area startups Shareaholic, InsightSquared, TurningArt and CustomMade.

Beisel offered these details in the e-mail:

“Our limited partner base ended up including a select group of individuals from the startup ecosystem as well as several large institutional investors (including a university endowment, a corporate pension fund, and a large multi-family office). Our portfolio has grown to fifteen companies today, the bulk of which is on the US East Coast and roughly half the companies have already progressed from the seed stage to completing Series A rounds. The first of these to exit was recently announced, with Groupon’s acquisition of Hyperpublic at the end of last week.”