Fuel Capital, a venture capital firm headed by founding partner Chris Howard and general partner Leah Busque. Busque joined Fuel Capital after selling her company TaskRabbit to Ikea. And Howard worked at Ignition Partners as a venture capitalist for six years before going off on his own.
Fuel Capital is known for investing in companies that are in development software, enterprise tools, and goods and services space. These companies include Katerra, Flexport, Convoy, Mesosphere, Clearbit, CTRL-Labs, Figma, Lattice, Nervana (acquired by Intel for more than $350 million), and CoreOS (acquired by RedHat for a reported $250 million).
The $75 million FUEL Fund III is an oversubscribed fund that brings Fuel’s total assets under management to $146 million. Fuel’s Fund I was $25 million and Fund II was $46 million. According to TechCrunch, the size of the checks will range from $75,000 to $1 million.
“With this new fund, we will focus on two key initiatives. First, we will go deeper in an area where we believe we can further earn our seat on the cap table – that is, by expanding the marketing and branding services we offer to our portfolio,” said Fuel in a statement. ”We will leverage Chris’ decade-long career in marketing and branding and Leah’s journey building TaskRabbit into a globally-recognized consumer brand to build a practical and actionable marketing platform to support our founders. This skill set is unique at the seed stage and often very complementary to the skill sets of the other investors around the table.”
In the last few years, marketing and branding support has been a recurring request from their portfolio companies. So they have doubled down on resources to help meet that need. And Fuel Capital recently hired Jamie Viggiano as chief marketing officer. Viggiano was previously the VP of Marketing at TaskRabbit and was a manager of global business analytics at Johnson & Johnson.
