- Script Capital — a pre-seed venture capital firm — announced a new $38 million fund recently. These are the details.
Script Capital — a pre-seed venture capital firm — announced a new $38 million fund recently. And the firm is also officially rebranding from its original name 122West Ventures to Script Capital. This is the second fund for founding partners AJ Solimine and Evan Tana.
Script Capital works with founders from day 2 of their journey to help navigate the challenges of finding an early product-market fit. The fund partners with founders building web3, data, collaboration, community & identity products.
Plus Script Capital is introducing their Community Data project, an open-data platform for founders. The first tool released is a database of investors to assist founders with identifying the right fundraising partners. And unlike existing data sets, Community Data investor data is free, exportable, and community-curated. Founders can compile lists of target investors and export data into Airtable, Notion, or Google Sheets to run their process.
The firm’s inaugural fund – which operated under the name 122West Ventures – was an $8 million fund closed in 2017. And just four years in, this first fund is marked up over 5x and has already distributed over 100% back to investors.
The portfolio includes early investments in The Graph ($GRT), Audius ($AUDIO), Material Security, Poparazzi, TrueNorth, Transcend, Karat Financial, Sqreen (acquired by DataDog), among many others. And portfolio companies in their first fund have collectively raised over $600 million in follow-on funding with an aggregate valuation over $7 billion.
Script Capital is managed by AJ Solimine and Evan Tana, entrepreneurs who spent the bulk of their careers building early-stage products and teams. Solimine previously founded Nitrous, a cloud development platform backed by Bessemer Venture Partners. And Tana spent the bulk of his career in consumer mobile and productivity, having helped found Shopkick, which was acquired by SK Planet for $250M in 2014, and most recently led new product development at Dropbox after his consumer social startup, Sparks Mobile, was acquired by the company in 2016.
KEY QUOTES:
“Evan and AJ were the first investors we called and the first money into the company. I’d want them to be the first money into anything I build in the future.”
— Roneil Rumburg, CEO of web3 music streaming platform Audius
“AJ and Evan believed in us from the beginning. They invested before we started YC and have helped us raise every round since. They’re consistently some of the first investors to reach out when I ask for anything.”
— Jin Stedge, co-founder of independent trucking platform TrueNorth
“Evan and AJ are some of the most knowledgeable, founder-friendly, and well-connected advocates I’ve had the good fortune of working with. I haven’t worked with anyone who will fight harder for you, and the expertise that they bring to the table in understanding product, investors, and company operations is unmatched.”
— Sam Yam, co-founder of creator membership platform Patreon
