Bonfire Ventures Raises $230M Across Two New VC Funds
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
Bonfire Ventures, the Santa Monica early-stage venture capital firm that has backed local business-to-business (B2B) software startups like ChowNow and Boulevard, has raised more than $230 million across two new funds, it announced Tuesday.
Bonfire raised $168 million for its third core fund and $63 million for its second opportunity fund—taking the firm to five total funds raised and more than $1 billion in assets under management, it said in a press release.
dot.LA previously reported that Bonfire was seeking to raise the new funds in January, when the venture firm filed regulatory documents indicating its intention to raise $165 million for its third core fund and $65 million for its second “select fund.”
Co-founders Jim Andelman and Mark Mullen told TechCrunch that Bonfire plans to only invest in 25-to-30 startups across each fund, so that the firm can offer more support to those startups. (Disclosure: Mullen is an investor in dot.LA.)
“We are very much a low-volume, high-conviction, high-support investor,” Andelman told TechCrunch. “We maintain the bandwidth to be responsive to founders and earn the role of first call when they have a question.”
Since launching in 2017, Bonfire has built its portfolio primarily around seed-stage, B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, which make up more than 99% of its investments, according to the firm’s website. Bonfire previously raised $100 million for its second fund in 2020, after raising its $63 million first fund in 2017.
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Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
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