Back in December, we reported that NextView Ventures, one of the few seed-stage venture firms in Boston, was looking to raise at least $50 million for a third fund, per an SEC filing that was processed at the time. Today, the firm says it has closed the fund with exactly that amount in capital commitments.
It’s a slight step up from the firm’s second fund, which closed with $40 million in 2014 and its debut fund of $21 million in 2012.
NextView was founded in 2010 by three former veterans of other venture firms: Dave Beisel, who’d previously worked for Venrock; Rob Go, who was formerly with Spark Capital; and Lee Hower, a former investor with Judith Capital.
The firm has long focused primarily on a wide-range of business-to-consumer type startups, with past investments that have included GetHuman, a 4.5-year-old, Boston-based startup that fights people’s customer service battles for them, and Optimus Ride, an MIT spin-off that’s at work on self-driving technologies.
In a new post, NextView says it will be chasing a specific-sounding but fairly broad theme with its third fund: the so-called everyday economy.
That doesn’t leave out a lot, obviously. As the post notes, everyday activity involves the home, transportation, food, work, money, health, apparel and entertainment. As it also notes, each market is arguably a $1 trillion-plus opportunity, and each is being disrupted every day by new digital technologies.
This time, however, NextView won’t be looking just at business-to-consumer opportunities. It points, for example, to Upserve, a tech platform that helps restaurants better serve their customers (by tracking sales, labor costs, discounts and more) in which NextView has invested.
Restaurant patrons don’t experience Upserve’s product first-hand, but it nevertheless has the potential to shape their “everyday” dining experiences, NextView argues, saying to expect more of the same.
Fourteen of NextView’s portfolio companies have been acquired, says the firm. Among these: Farmeron, a farming data startup that raised $4.3 million, was acquired last year by privately held Virtus Nutrition for undisclosed terms.
Another company, seven-year-old, Boston-based Objective Logistics, a maker of employee performance software that had raised $7.6 million from investors, was acquired last year by the cybersecurity company Bit9 in a reported acqui-hire.
NextView also was an investor in the mobile ad startup TapCommerce, acquired by Twitter in 2014 for a reported $100 million. The company had raised $11.7 million altogether.