Floodgate, a Palo Alto, Ca.-based early stage venture capital firm, has raised $131 million for its sixth fund, according to an SEC filing that shows the 11-year-old firm turned to just eight investors for the capital commitments.
Though small by today’s fundraising standards, the fund reflects a bit of a departure for the firm, whose fifth fund closed with $76 million in 2014. (Its fourth fund similarly closed with $75 million and its third closed with $73.5 million.)
Floodgate doesn’t typically make announcements around its fundraises.
The firm was originally founded by Mike Maples, who cofounded and took public an Austin, Tex.-based software company, Motive, before jumping into venture capital.
Ann Miura Ko, once an analyst at CRV, joined Maples soon after as a cofounding partner in 2008.
The firm also counts as investors Iris Choi, Arjun Chopra and Ryan Walsh.
Floodgate typically backs very early-stage companies in both the Bay Area and in Austin.
Some of its newest bets include LabDoor, a startup that tests and rates supplements (we wrote about it here); MissionU, a still-stealth education startup; legal discovery startup TextIQ (more on the company here), and a Mexico City-based delivery startup called Rappi.
Some of its most recent exits include the sale of Kanjoya, a cloud workforce intelligence startup, to Ultimate Software for undisclosed terms; the sale of the self-publishing platform Pronoun to MacMillan for an undisclosed sum; and the sale of the software development tool company Xamarin to Microsoft. (The terms were never publicly disclosed, but a WSJ source pegged the amount at between $400 million and $500 million.)
Floodgate’s other bets include the ride-hailing company Lyft; the digital lifestyle media company Refinery 29; the freelance labor force app TaskRabbit; Demandforce (which sold to Intuit for roughly $420 million in cash in 2012); and Twitter, which went public in late 2013.
Update: An earlier version of this story stated that Maples was formerly an EVP at Microsoft. Our screw-up, sorry; Maples’s father was a Microsoft EVP.
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