Pear VC announced that it closed its 4th fund – which was at $432 million. According to Prequin Ltd., the Q4 2022 VC fundraising was down 65% from the previous year. And this fundraising by Pear is one of the largest seed funds raised in recent years by a non-multistage fund, which is a bright spot in a choppy VC environment.
This funding will be used to continue doubling down in one of the brightest areas in venture investing: pre-seed and seed, especially in competitive areas like AI, and programs such as PearX, Pear’s early-stage boot camp for founders; Pear’s Female Founders Circle, a community for technical female entrepreneurs; and Pear Dorm, which supports student builders.
Pear’s team spent the last decade building the firm from the ground up. The venture firm seeded 3 public companies (DoorDash, Guardant Health, and Senti Bio) and many others valued at over $1 billion (Gusto, Branch, Aurora Solar, Vanta, and others). Pear’s Fund I is a top 5th percentile performing fund, in terms of net DPI.2 Pear was started by Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson in 2013.
This funding comes at a time when markets continue to cool, but many of Pear’s Limited Partners doubled down on their investments from previous Pear funds, showing that investors are particularly impressed with Pear’s track record to date and prospects for the future. And LPs realize the importance of having a dedicated seed fund in their portfolio at this time.
Pear runs multiple programs to support early-stage entrepreneurs, including PearX, a 14-week-long early-stage boot camp for founders. Pear has already had a number of breakout PearX companies, including Affinity, Xilis, Federato, Viz.ai, and Cardless – which all got their start through the PearX program. And with Fund IV, Pear will be adding a new track: PearX for AI, a program tailored for AI builders with added benefits like hackerspace, cloud credits, and 1:1 coaching with AI experts from the Pear team and organizations like Google Cloud.
Plus Pear also has a deep history of investing in student builders through the Pear Dorm program. Now 50% of Pear’s portfolio companies are student-founded, representing $15 billion in total valuation, including Branch, Aurora Solar, Affinity, Viz.ai, and Bioage. With Fund IV, Pear will be expanding its Dorm team and introducing new programs.
This fund also arrives at a moment when Pear is stepping up to support more female entrepreneurs. And Pear runs a Female Founders Circle program, which is focused on helping train technical female founders moving into entrepreneurship. To date, 41% of Pear’s portfolio companies have a female founder and the Pear team is 50% female itself. With Fund IV, Pear looks to increase the size and scale of the Female Founders Circle program.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re operators and founders specializing in pre-seed and seed – that’s all we do all day every day. We are a generalist firm with specialist investors and operators who act as deep thought-partners and know founders’ industries inside and out.”
— Mar Hershenson, Pear’s Founding Managing Partner
“Pear believed in DoorDash when we were still a tiny startup near Stanford called Palo Alto Delivery. They saw our potential and offered unwavering support to us from our earliest days through the DoorDash IPO.”
— Stanley Tang, Co-founder and CPO of DoorDash
“The new fund will bolster our mission to help early-stage founders build legendary companies from the ground up. This fund will allow us to build the infrastructure that helps founders go from idea stage to product-market fit. This includes founder services like talent, go-to-market, engineering, marketing, and more. For example, we plan to scale out our talent services team led by Matt Birnbaum, which includes four senior recruiters. For founders, helping them hire for their early teams is part of our core offering, which we know from experience can really shape the entire culture and tone of a startup.”
— Pejman Nozad, Pear’s other Founding Managing Partner
