Signia Venture Partners Reveals $85 Million Third Early-Stage Fund

By Dan Anderson ● Sep 11, 2019
  • Signia Venture Partners recently revealed that it closed a third early-stage venture capital fund at $85 million

Signia Venture Partners has announced it has closed its third early-stage venture capital fund at $85 million. The original fund launched by Signia Venture Partners in 2012 was set up by managing directors Rick Thompson, Ed Cluss, and Zaw Thet.

Thet left the firm to lead fitness technology company Exer — which is one of Signia’s portfolio companies. And Sunny Dhillon became a managing director recently.

The third fund had actually closed in late 2018 and six investments have been made from the new fund already.

In a blog post, Signia pointed out that the Signia Venture Partners I was the largest seed investor in Cruise Automation (autonomous vehicle tech company that achieved $19 billion valuation after spinning out of General Motors following an acquisition in 2016). The SVP I fund also included the exits of FunPlus (social gaming startup that sold to Chinese gaming conglomerate Zhongji for nearly $1 billion) and Tenor (acquired by Alphabet).

The Signia Venture Partners II (SVP II) was set up between 2015 and 2018. And the portfolio companies in that fund include Reali (tech-enabled realtor closing over 50 houses per month that raised $40 million) and Fortem (uses advanced radar technology and machine learning to enable airports and other critical infrastructure), and StriVR (the leader in VR assisted training used by major companies like Walmart).

The first investment SVP III made was Sendoso (world’s first sending platform that sources, warehouses, and manages company swag and customer gifting). And it also invested in Picap, Exer, and Inertia Systems.

And Signia also expanded the Signia team in SVP III with associate David Bloom and head of community Heidi Burns Hilton. They will be joining existing team members chief financial officer Anagha Raje and partner relations director Gina Domizio. For this current fund, Signia promoted Linus Liang to partner as well.

The LPs for this fund include major media companies, colleges, hospitals, national museums, and several large institutional funds.