Eniac Ventures is announcing its second fund to invest in mobile startups. The new fund is $12.9 million, significantly larger than the first $1.6 million fund. The company plans to use the new fund to continue to back mobile-first ideas in the adtech, consumer, enterprise and commerce industries.
Eniac, which was founded by Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Vic Singh and Tim Young, is focused solely on making small seed stage investments in mobile startups. Previously the the average size of the investment was around $25,000 to $100,000, but the new fund will allow for bigger checks, in the $200,000 to $300,000 range with money for follow-on rounds.
Mehta, the founder of ad-tech startup Local Response, originally sold his first company ipsh! to Omnicom in 2005 and was an angel investor in AdMob (which was sold to Google for $750 million). Harris was the Head of Business Strategy and Vice President of Marketing at Vlingo which was acquired by Nuance for $225 million, as well as the CMO of Thumb, which was acquired by Ypulse in mid-2013.
Since 2010, Eniac has backed 42 early stage mobile investments with six exits. Investments include LocalResponse, OnSwipe, Localytics, Tempo AI, MindSnacks, Fondu (acquired by Airbnb), Instinctive (acquired by Soundcloud) and MetaResolver (acquired by Millennial Media). which almost tripled Eniac’s investment in less than a year. We’re told that the total value of first fund has increased 2x from the initial investment.
Eniac is also announcing some of the investments it has already made out of the fund, including BioBeats, Boxed, Glide, Just Sing It, Reactor, RapCommerce, and Vistar Media.