Announcing our $125M Fund III

Today we’re excited to publicly announce the launch of Angular Ventures III, a $125M inception-stage fund dedicated to determined technical founders across Europe and Israel solving today’s most complex problems.

• Hard tech for hard markets. We love partnering with technical founders tackling tough markets. In the last twelve months alone, we’ve backed founders leveraging technical breakthroughs to take on some of the world’s hardest-to-crack markets: international ocean shipping, small-scale manufacturing, modern power grid optimization, the complete re-invention of the Kubernetes stack, electromagnetic space launch systems, next-generation sequencing, nuclear power, among others.
• An equal partnership designed to take risk. Any time a founder meets either of us, they get a person empowered to run a full process and make a final investment decision. We do all our own work, and, with zero internal politics or conflicting agendas, we focus on exactly what we promised our limited partners we’d do: leading rounds to back the most ambitious founders we can find.
• Building a firm for company building. We’re constructing a firm focused on one thing: helping founders build companies that can compete globally from day one. Our advisory partner network continues to grow, with a keen focus on advisors with experience scaling in the US. This week, we are hosting our first-ever founder summit — a GTM-focused “sales kickoff” style event — in New York City.
• Expanding the team. We are also incredibly excited to announce that Hazel Mulhare has joined Angular to focus on building our network globally. More on that below.

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A specialist firm for founders building globally from day one

While this fund announcement is a meaningful milestone in our journey of building a firm, we know that a fund announcement is of little consequence to the founders battling every day in the trenches. What we believe matters, however, is the way we are approaching the venture business and how we build partnerships with founders. So for those who don’t already know us here is how we operate:

• Built for risk. Our equal-partner-only model is intentionally designed to help the firm take risk. We’ve taken politics and process out of the equation for founders. We are focused on the only conversation that matters: the one between a founder and a venture backer who is empowered to act. We’re built to support each other in taking risks and bet on founders with the audacity to tackle huge problems in novel ways.
• Leadership and partnership. Our risk appetite has direct benefits for founders. In about 95% of the companies we back, we are the lead investor in the first round. In many cases, we are the only investor in the first round, and we often wire capital before any other investors have committed. We take our role as founders’ lead financial partner seriously — and that means both always speaking honestly and often putting capital behind our conviction — even when others do not. We are on hand for the toughest conversations at the hardest times. When necessary, we are the first call and the last call.
• Focus on people. We’re super excited that Hazel Mulhare has joined our team. With over 14 years of experience spanning both venture capital and executive recruiting, Hazel is a connector who brings a deep set of relationships across the ecosystem and a unique set of skills that we know will be tremendously valuable to all of our portfolio companies. The most important thing we do as a firm is work with amazing people across disciplines around the world. The founders we back are a crucial part of this, but the effort goes way beyond that. We are constantly mapping thought-leaders across new disciplines. We are always seeking out functional experts to coach and advise founders on how to scale their businesses. We are actively supporting founders with their recruiting efforts for senior hires as well as potential customers and partners. Nothing is as important as putting the right person in the right place at the right time. Expanding and enhancing this never-ending flow of people is at the core of what we do, and Hazel will take this to new heights.
• Big enough to matter. With a $125M fund (and additional capital via other vehicles), we are able to write first checks up to $6M and follow-on with even larger checks. Some companies require enormous “seed” rounds of up to $100M. But most companies — especially those operating in truly new areas — can do a lot of damage with far less capital. Our fund is large enough to fund companies to meaningful milestones and value creation — and our platform effort and advisory partner network are large enough to drive significant value for companies. Many first-check investors are sub-scale in terms of capital and support, and we are proud to be able to carry a company alone when necessary.
• Small enough to care. Large fund size, however, can also have major disadvantages for founders. We deliberately kept our fund size constrained (we could have raised twice as much) in order to ensure that we can maintain our focus on excellence. Our fund allows us to make 24 investments, about 8 per year. What that means is that every investment matters. We do not buy options. We do not follow others. We do not place random bets on companies to see what happens. We invest in the success of founders in whom we have deep conviction, and we care deeply about the outcomes of every company in our portfolio.
• Fully aligned. As a small, partner-only firm, we are fully aligned with the success of our founders. There is no “growth fund” or “seed program” or “accelerator” or any other agenda other than driving core fund performance through close partnership with founders. That’s it. That’s all we do.

Winning means the US.

We are highly specialized in one very valuable playbook: helping early-stage founders from Europe and Israel cross the Atlantic chasm and penetrate the US market to compete globally from day one. While there are some exceptions, in almost every case we believe that dominating the US market from the beginning is essential for success. The US market is the biggest market for enterprise technology in the world. By focusing on the US, founders are able to speak with more customers that matter, learn more quickly, and iterate faster. That early growth compounds, resulting in a commanding lead over competitors that decided instead to stay close to home.

As such, we have constructed the firm to support our founders in competing globally from day one:

• Our advisory partner network continues to grow, with a keen focus on advisors that can help founders build durable businesses in the US. Mike Heller, who was part of the original (and revolutionary) “product-led sales” team at Dropbox and then ran go-to-market (GTM) at Clearbit, will be bringing his PLG expertise to bear on bottoms-up sales motions. Scott Davis, who previously ran sales at AppDynamics and Medallia, will be advising companies on managing complex sales processes and scaling sales teams. Mike and Scott join a growing and impressive list of advisors, each of whom has built a massive business in the US, including: Eldad Farkash (Founder & CEO of Firebolt), Fred Simon (Founder & Chief Architect of JFrog), Jerry Dischler (President at Google), Parm Uppal (CRO at Benchling), and several others.
• Angular portfolio founders now have access to our on-demand office space in New York and San Francisco, in addition to our HQ in London and outpost in Tel Aviv (no more squatting in coffee shops between meetings when visiting from overseas!)
• We are holding our first-ever founder summit — a GTM-focused “sales kickoff” style event — in New York City in February. We will be joined by a broad network of experts in pricing, negotiation, product marketing, sales hiring and more, as well as founders and operators from the likes of Elastic, Snyk and Datadog — companies born in Europe that successfully penetrated the US market from day one.

Fundraising process

In early 2023, as we began the fundraising process, we knew we were operating in one of the most challenging venture fundraising climates in recent memory. Despite that, we received an incredibly warm reception and the fund was 2x oversubscribed against its $120M target. Our track record includes being there pre-revenue, at the beginning for horizontal category leaders like Snyk (DevSecOps), JFrog (CI/CD), Front (email), Valohai (ML Ops), Tensorleap (DNN design), and Firebolt (cloud data warehouses) as well as vertical category leaders such as Aquant (field service), Beebop (energy flexibility), CruxOCM (industrial APC), and Portchain (container shipping). Making big bets early is what we know and all we do, and our decision to stay true to a clear simple approach to venture proved compelling to institutional investors.

It also meant we deliberately left the vast majority of that oversubscription on the table — to execute optimally on our strategy of being the early-stage partner of choice for technical founders from day one.

Choosing our investors also allows us to be true to our values. Our brand and track record means we have some of the world’s best institutional investors as Limited Partners, or LPs, including several US university and hospital endowments, some of the best fund of funds there and in Europe, plus a handful of outstanding individuals who have been with us since Fund I. More importantly, we haven’t taken capital from governments, corporations, or investors in Russia, China, or other non-democratic regimes.

This is a uniquely powerful moment for technology entrepreneurship

We are living through dramatic changes in both venture financing and technology itself. After years of painstaking incremental progress, a tidal wave of innovation driven by AI and advanced computing is crashing over all of us. At the same time, advances in energy, biology, space technologies, and other frontier technologies are colliding against unprecedented societal needs and climate emergencies. The geopolitical landscape is witness to unexpected turmoil and the regulatory environment is shifting under our feet. All of this is happening as the global economy in general — and the venture capital industry in particular — struggles to adjust to the post ZIRP era. While we are keenly aware of the tumultuous environment that confronts us with opportunities and challenges, our focus is always on the individual founders who must devise the means to harness these forces to create successful outcomes against impossible odds. We are all standing in awe at the size of the waves crashing over the technology world. In the midst of that tumult, our role is to partner with the small bands of sailors, pirates, and explorers who are committed to navigating a course into the future.

-Gil and David