Tribeca Venture Partners Closes Its Second NY-Focused Fund

Tribeca Venture Partners, a New York-based early-stage venture firm founded in 2011, is today announcing that it has closed its second fund with $107 million — significantly more than its $65 million debut fund.

That’s good news for New York startups. In a conversation earlier this week with Brian Hirsch and Chip Meakem — Tribeca’s co-founders and its sole investors (still) — they talked at length of their near-exclusive focus on the startups in their own backyard.

That somewhat unique positioning apparently resonated with LPs. (Of the 25 companies backed with their first fund, 21 are based in New York.)

As Hirsch and Meakem readily concede, it also helps that Tribeca secured most of its LP commitments before the third quarter of last year, well in advance of the market turmoil that has followed.

Investors are plainly backing Tribeca’s potential, too. With the oldest company in its portfolio just reaching the ripe old age of four, it has seen just two minor exits, including one acqui-hire with the sale of the web TV startup NimbleTV to the publicly traded company Synacor last year.

Meanwhile, others of its bets have been marked up considerably, including the adtech company AppNexus; the iPad point-of-sale system ShopKeep; and the online lending company CommonBond.

According to CrunchBase, AppNexus has raised $288 million to date (Tribeca joined its $75 million Series D round; the company has raised three subsequent rounds). ShopKeep has raised $97.5 million from investors (Tribeca led its $8.7 million Series A round). And CommonBond, whose $2.2 million Series A was also led by Tribeca, has raised nearly $44 million to date, along with $275 million in debt.

Of course, mark-ups aren’t the same as exits, and a lot of companies are beginning to look crippled from too much funding. AppNexus, for example, has long been a potential IPO target, yet hasn’t managed to cross into the public market, in part because of the poor performance of adtech companies that trade publicly. Meanwhile, its list of preferred shareholders has grown longer.

Asked if Tribeca is worried that AppNexus may have missed its window to go public, Meakem — who was one of the first employees at early adtech company Active Imaginations (founded in 1995) — says he is not.

“Ad tech has been in and out of favor since the ad server was created,” said Meakem.

“Specific to AppNexus, the plan is to continue to grow a really good company. At some point, I think it will make sense to access public capital do to that, but we don’t need to go public [right now]. AppNexus’s business model and unit economics don’t look like most of the other ad tech companies out there.”