Eniac Ventures closed two funds totaling $220 million, which it shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
based in New York Eniac raised $60 million for Select 1, the company’s vehicle for later-stage follow-on investments in portfolio companies, and $160 million for Eniac VI. The company has made 11 investments since Select 1, which actually closed in 2021 but was not publicly announced until now. The firm plans to make its first investment “soon” from its sixth fund, according to co-founder and general partner Nihal Mehta. He intends to do about 40 investments in both funds.
When making new investments, Eniac’s average check size is $1.5 million. Subsequent checks are typically larger, Mehta said, with the largest check invested by her Select Fund being $6 million.
Eniac is a domain agnostic company, with Mehta describing the team as “generalists before product and before market”. Despite being industry agnostic, even Eniac has been bitten by the AI bug, with Mehta noting that “machine learning and artificial intelligence has been a dominant theme” for the company over the past decade.
“There’s some hype around artificial intelligence, but we think it’s the most transformative wave of computing we’ve seen since the internet,” he said.
Portfolio companies include 1up Health, Alloy, Anchor, Attentive, Brightwheel, Embrace, Ghost, Hinge, Hive, Level.ai, Maestro, Owlet and Vungle. Eniac was also an early investor in Airbnb and has seen exits at companies such as TapCommerce (at Twitter), Anchor (at Spotify), Dubsmash (at Reddit), Hinge (at IAC), Workflow (at Apple), the Vungle (in Blackstone). ) and Vence (to Merck Animal Health).
Mehta declined to name specific LPs, noting only that they are a mix of “leading foundations, endowments, pensions and funds of funds” and that the majority of them are “mission-driven.”
Despite the challenging fundraising environment, Mehta said the fundraising “is ironically the fastest” Eniac has done in 15 years.
“We attribute that success to being able to return a lot of capital over the last few years,” he told TechCrunch, though he declined to provide specifics about returns.
The size of Eniac’s funds has grown significantly over the years. Eniac raised its $1.5 million seed fund in 2010, raised $100 million for its fourth fund in 2017, and raised another $125 million for Eniac Fund V in 2021. Over the years, it has supported more than 250 startups.
