Charlie O’Donnell’s Brooklyn Bridge Ventures Raises $8.3M To Back NYC Startups

VC Charlie O’Donnell, who has worked at both First Round Capital and Union Square Ventures, is announcing the second raise, of $8.25 million, for his New York City-based, early-stage VC fund Brooklyn Bridge Ventures.

The LPs include Wiley Cerilli (founder of SinglePlatform), David Rose, Howard Morgan, Josh Kopelman, Brad Feld, Peter and Thomas Lehrman, Thomas Wisniewski, Richard Katzman, Alain Bankier, Matthew and Susan Daimler, Two Sigma Investments and KEC (Jeff Citron)

O’Donnell launched Brooklyn Bridge Ventures in 2012 to make investments of up to $250,000 each in early and seed-stage technology companies in the “Greater Brooklyn Area” (which includes Manhattan and other boroughs) across a variety of information technology sectors. The fund, which generally leads or co-leads seed rounds, has made investments in 12 startups over the past two years. These include Orchard, Makr, Floored, Tinybop, Versa, Editorially, and Superhuman.

O’Donnell tells us that with a larger fund, he can create more infrastructure for portfolio companies and invest more into companies. The portfolio is worth over 2x, and the fund has seen 132 percent IRR, adds O’Donnell.

Previously, O’Donnell worked at Union Square Ventures and at First Round Capital, where he sourced First Round’s Investment in GroupMe, which sold to Skype in 2011. Other deals that O’Donnell has worked on for First Round include Refinery29, chloe + isabel, Backupify, SinglePlatform, Salescrunch and Docracy.