Early-stage venture financing company Susa Ventures reported closing $375 million in additional capital from investors last year. The most recent round of funding, which consists of a $125 million seed-stage fund and a $250 million opportunity fund, would allow Susa Ventures to keep funding market leaders like Robinhood, Flexport, Mux, Newfront Insurance, Stord, and Viz.ai.
Susa Ventures IV will invest $1–2 million at the seed stage and Susa Ventures Opportunities II will invest $10–15 million at the Series B and C stages with the new funds, mostly into Susa Ventures’ current portfolio businesses. While continuing to invest across a range of sectors, the venture capital firm will largely concentrate on fintech, healthcare, supply chain, and software-as-a-service.
“People always assume seed stage funds stop after the initial investment, but we’re in it for the long run,” said Chad Byers, co-founder and general partner at Susa Ventures. “This two-fund structure allows Susa to back portfolio companies from Series Seed to IPO, as we did with Robinhood which recently went public.”
“As a seed-stage fund, we look to get involved early and change the trajectory of a company,” said Leo Polovets, co-founder and general partner at Susa Ventures. “While we help our founders with a variety of things including, recruiting, strategy, customer acquisition and engineering, it’s our relentless focus on community building and our ability to facilitate top tier follow-on funding that we pride ourselves on.”
With the help of the most recent fund, Susa Ventures is also able to keep providing its founders with the rare chance to join a parallel fund as limited partners without paying any fees or carry. With 91 partners from the Susa Ventures portfolio investing in this round, the opportunity was first presented in 2019 as part of Susa Ventures III and is being continued in Susa Ventures IV.
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From the company’s initial 41 investments made with the first $25 million fund, five have a seed value of over $1 billion, and seven have already seen profitable exits with a combined value of more than $323 million.
Investments In African Startups
Susa has been investing in African start-ups at Susa since its first fund. Its first investment was in Andela, a company that has actually trained some of Okra’s talented early engineers. Also invested in Okra, an open finance fintech infrastructure company in Lagos, Nigeria. It also most recently led a $5M investment in Kenya-based Powered by People (PBP), a global B2B wholesale marketplace that connects independent brands and makers in 47 countries to retailers in North America.
Susa Ventures Africa Susa Ventures Africa
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard