Thomvest Ventures will launch a new $250 million fund in 2024 and promotes Umesh Padval and Nima Wedlake to managing directors.
The Bay Area venture capital firm was founded about 25 years ago by Peter Thomson, whose family is a majority shareholder in Thomson Reuters.
“Peter has always been very interested in technology and the role it plays in shaping society and the future,” Don Butler, managing director at Thomvest Ventures, who met Thomson in 1999 and joined the firm in 2000, told TechCrunch .
As we’ve seen over the past few years, the venture capital industry is inevitably cyclical. Butler said Thomvest had been watching for decades and decided in 2010 to abandon the generalist field and invest specifically in a few key industries.
“For example, every time a cybersecurity expert speaks, you know he knows the market very well, he knows our competitors, he knows the customers, he knows the needs of the market,” Butler said. “We thought, ‘Well, we want to be like them.'”
Today, Thomvest Ventures deploys capital in financial and real estate technology, cybersecurity, cloud and artificial intelligence/data infrastructure.
The new $250 million capital commitment brings the company’s total assets under management to $750 million.
Butler expects the new fund to invest in 25 to 30 companies. Check sizes range from $5 million to $15 million in the early stages and $7 million to $25 million in the later stages. Thomson has made some investments so far, but they have not made them public, he said.
“The last two quarters have given us a record number of new prospects,” Butler said. “At a later stage, the best companies are able to capture some form of profitability and avoid some kind of repricing through the market. Internal investors know what they have and say ‘we’ll fix this. “Now we’re starting to see some companies in the later stages that have made some progress and are looking to return to growth rates.”
Thomvest raised its last fund in 2017 and has made more than 75 investments in total. Some notable companies include Blend Labs, Carta, Cohere, Kabbage, LendingClub, SoFi, and Vungle.
Meanwhile, current managing director Umesh Padval will continue to lead investments in cybersecurity, cloud and artificial intelligence/data infrastructure, while Nima Wedlake leads investments in real estate technology.
