YC Partners Garry Tan and Harj Taggar along with the early-stage firm’s “Ambassador to the East” and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have raised $39 million for a separate fund called Initialized Capital, according to an SEC filing today.
All three of them have been investing on their own for a couple years and Initialized Capital isn’t formally tied to Y Combinator in any way. It is their own fund. Taggar, who recently went part-time at Y Combinator, was not involved in raising this fund.
Initialized looks for high-quality founders first and then try to see if they can help or understand the market a company is attacking in any way. The fund is open to all companies, regardless of whether they have been part of the Y Combinator program or not.
It’s their second fund, following an earlier $7 million one that has backed companies like Zach Verdin’s New Hive.
Y Combinator has historically taken a two to 10 percent stake in its companies in exchange for $11,000 plus $3,000 per founder, which is ideally enough to get a startup to a decent first prototype. The firm sometimes invests more than that. But it historically hasn’t done serious follow-on funding, and has instead left that to the broader community of angels and venture capital firms.