- London-based Crane Venture Partners announced it raised $90 million for its “Crane I” fund
Crane Venture Partners is a relatively new venture capital firm that was formed to invest in intelligent enterprise companies. Founded by DFJ Esprit executives Scott Sage and Krishna Visvanathan a few years ago, Crane Venture Partners just had its second closing with a total of $90 million.
The “Crane I” fund will be used for investing in data-driven enterprise companies, according to TechCrunch. Crane Partner Andy Leaver will also be active in this fund. The first close for Crane I happened in July 2018. And the company had previously established a pre-cursor fund and started investing in Q1 2016.
Crane is looking to invest in European startups that are seeking pre-Series A. Some of the investments Crane already made include Aire, Avora, Stratio Automotive, and Tessian.
The investments will range at about $750,000 to $3 million with sizeable follow-on reserves to support the companies through Series B.
Crane will also focus on supporting founders with their go-to-market strategy, which may include everything from product positioning and generating marketing leads to setting up high-performance sales teams and upselling customers.
The LPs that invested in this fund include MassMutual Ventures (Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company’s venture capital arm), the British Patient Capital (BPC), and other founders, venture capitalists, and institutions around the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Crane also set up a strategic partnership with MassMutual Ventures where its portfolio companies would have deep access to new markets and networks as they expand to other countries.
Visvanathan told TechCrunch that Crane is especially bullish about London as the area has a high concentration of data science and software talent. The venture firm pointed out that “90% of cloud and enterprise software companies that went public in the last 8-10 years opened their first international office in London.”
