As reported earlier this year, Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar and Goldman Sachs managing director Scott Stanford left their day jobs to build a new, company-building venture and VC fund called Sherpa. According to an SEC filing released today, Sherpa is raising around $150 million in funding. Of course, this is not a final number, and this could fluctuate as the funding closes.
The news of Pishevar and Stanford’s new venture was first reported by AllThingsD back in March. At the time, we heard that Sherpa was going to introduce a new model for building and creating companies through a mix and match of strategic corporate partnerships and working with well-known entrepreneurs.
Sherpa is divided into two parts: First, there will be The Foundry, which Pishevar at the time said will use funds and assets from a number of strategic corporations, combined with help from some well-known entrepreneurs to create new companies. There was also a corresponding fund that was created to invest in those new companies. The Sherpa Ventures Fund, as titled in the SEC filing, could be this fund.
This new hybrid model for both startup creation and investing is just part of the growing trend of company building happening in the VC world. Many entrepreneurs are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC (in Shervin’s case, he did join Menlo Ventures but left the firm to start Sherpa) to instead create a studio-like holding operation and fund.
Considering Pishevar’s experience as a serial entrepreneur (he’s founded — and sold — a number of startups) and Stanford’s background of coordinating and financing the IPOs of companies like Facebook and Zynga, it should be interesting to see what Sherpa has up its sleeve.
We’ve reached out to Pishevar for comment and will update accordingly.