Craft Ventures Closes A $500 Million Second Fund

By Amit Chowdhry • Oct 23, 2019
  • Craft Ventures, a venture firm founded by serial entrepreneur David O. Sacks, announced it closed $500 million in capital commitments for its second fund

Craft Ventures — a venture firm founded by serial entrepreneur David O. Sacks in 2017 — announced it closed $500 million in capital commitments for its second fund. The target for this fund started about a year ago. The first fund that Craft raised closed at $350 million so this is a $150 million jump.

Along with Sacks, the partners at Craft Ventures include Bill Lee, Jeff Fluhr, and Sky Dayton. Lee was the co-founder of Remarq (acquired by Critical Path for $265 million in 2000) and the Social Concepts incubator. Fluhr founded StubHub and Spreecast. And Dayton founded Earthlink, eCompanies, and Boingo Wireless. Prior to launching Craft, Sacks was the COO of PayPal and then founded Geni.com and Yammer (acquired by Microsoft).

Craft tends to invest in seed, Series A, and Series B rounds. Sacks led the Series A round of Bird, a rapidly growing e-scooter company. Fluhr oversaw the Series A round investment in Trusted Health. Lee invested in e-sports company Cloud9. Dayton focuses on Hard Tech and led Craft’s Series A investment in Swarm Technologies. The firm has also invested in companies like Terminal, Fold, Sling Health, Soundstripe, Superplastic, The Boring Company, and Neyborly.

“The world needs innovators — the pioneers and idealists who envision and create a better future. Many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs did not look like success stories when they started. They were underdogs, failures, renegades, non-conformists, outcasts, scrappy idealists that had a single-minded quest that drove them to succeed,” wrote Sacks in a blog post. “At Craft, our mission is to find this rare breed of greatness and support them through the existential, make-or-break moments. We’re here to assist when it counts most — when founders need expert advice from people who have done it before. We are Founders Backing Founders.”