- VC fund Fifty Years recently announced that it closed $50 million for Fund II
- Fifty Years is seeking to invest in entrepreneurs who are focused on solving the world’s biggest problems
San Francisco-based early-stage VC fund Fifty Years which is led by Seth Bannon (founding partner), Ela Madej (partner), and Shuo Yang (principal) — recently closed $50 million for Fund II. The name Fifty Years comes from the name of Winston Churchill’s 1931 essay “Fifty Years Hence.”
The investors in the new fund include the founders of Skype, Google Brain, Minecraft, Baidu, and Github, according to Impact Alpha. Fifty Years specializes in finding tech entrepreneurs looking to solve the world’s largest problems.
The companies that Fifty Years is seeking to invest in are focused on climate change and malnutrition. Another area of focus for Fifty Years is plant-based and lab-grown proteins. This concept has gone mainstream with the IPO of Beyond Meat and the rapid growth of Impossible Foods. Fifty Years is an investor in Memphis Meats and Rebellyous Foods.
The first fund that Fifty Years worked on made an average of $100,000 investments in 32 startups, of which most were graduates of the Y Combinator accelerator program. And the second fund made over 20 investments of between $500,000 and $1 million.
