Entrepreneurs First made a name for itself a decade ago in its home base of London, for the novel approach it takes to tech investing, instead of seeking out interesting, scaling startups like typical VCs, it backs founders and their very, very early stage startup ideas.
Its method, and the results, have catapulted EF to a portfolio that is now worth $10 billion over more than 500 companies, and now it is announcing a new round of fundraise. The funds are coming in the form of a Series C that values the company at around $560 million.
Its investors are often VCs and angels themselves, two groups that are forever looking for better signal in the startup noise. The brothers who co-founded Stripe, Patrick and John, are among the new backers.
There is an impressive list of people who have already invested in it.
According to an interview with Alice and Matt, around $100 million will be used to continue investing in more entrepreneurs and their startup and will be converted into an evergreen fund. The management fee on top of the investment from those in whom it invests is not taken by EF. If two individuals build a company after finding each other through our program, they go to our investment committee after 12 weeks for us to get their money.
The rest of the funding, around one-third of the total, will be going into continuing to build EF itself, which is why it's more than just a syndicate.
Although it has always used part of the money it raises to grow its own operations, it is using this round to double down on that idea more than ever before.
The company has 120 employees in offices in London, Toronto, Paris, Berlin, Bangalore and Singapore.
Form's next iteration will be the next step in work it's already done building tools to manage the database of its own portfolio.
The $10 billion of portfolio value was achieved with a single product for a very specific type of founder. Form works well for first time entrepreneurs in the first six to seven years of their career who are ready to start. It is known that that is a small fraction of the world's great potential founders. Over time, we want to get to the point where every ambitiousentrepreneur can find their co- founder at EF. There is enormous growth potential here, but we are not yet ready to share it.
Some of this will be about trying to bottle up the secret sauce that they have created.
"Intuition doesn't scale, and Entrepreneur First is doing this at scale." We can say which criteria is most indicative of future funding thanks to the data points we have. We are wary of pattern spotting, but we believe in using data to build better intuition.
It has always been difficult to put more of a focus on investing in companies that have yet to prove their ideas.
The efforts should be difficult. It's not easy to innovate.
More attention is given to repeat founders and those with experience at successful startup because they have a better track record that could help them in the future.
As the startup world has boomed, it has become more difficult to get into the most premium funding for startups that have already proven themselves, and more investors are looking at ways of connecting with those earlier concepts. One recent example: Sequoia and its launch of Arc, its own effort to connect with very early stage startups and founders, which seems a little inspired by EF.
If there is an element of long game in VC, EF is probably in the category playing the very longest game, with just $680 million in exits. There is an exit list that includes Sonantic, the voice artificial intelligence company that was acquired bySpotify recently.
There will be more rises and falls before the world is stable.
There has been pressure cascading down from public tech down to valuations of the largest privately-held startups and so on and so forth. I don't know if that valuation is indicative of pressure on the company, but as far as I can tell, it only went out to raise $100 million for this Series C, which would have put it at a more modest goal than its previous fundraise. It will be difficult to see which startup will make it in the long run, but the numbers speak to the fact that EF may be able to weather this storm.
"We are entering a new era for venture funding, with a new generation of global founders needing support to build iconic companies from scratch." The new way for talented people to access that opportunity is calledEntrepreneur First.
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