San Francisco-based venture capital firm Cloud Apps Capital Partners has announced its market-focused investment strategy targeting early-stage companies in the cloud business applications sector, and its first fund.
Founded by former salesforce.com executive and venture capitalist Matt Holleran (pictured), the firm takes an innovative approach to supporting early-stage companies. Leveraging more than 20 years of combined investing and operating experience in the business applications market, Cloud Apps Capital Partners is able to help portfolio companies with market-specific expertise and a rich network of cloud industry executives and experts.
“TIFF is focused on offering our endowment and foundation clients access to highly regarded, early-stage venture capital investors. We believe Cloud Apps Capital is uniquely positioned to take advantage of innovation in the business application market.”
Matt Holleran, general partner of Cloud Apps Capital, and his team have decades of operational and go-to-market experience building and investing in category-leading business software companies. This first-hand product, sales, marketing and business-development experience distinguishes the firm in its ability to evaluate and invest in cloud business app companies ahead of market traction: Investing and engaging pre-traction helps entrepreneurs accelerate and maximise their business potential during the critical early stage. Cloud Apps Capital Partners leads Classic Series A financings of $2 million to $4 million and provides full board support, which gives entrepreneurs the right amount of funding along with operational guidance from an experienced and engaged investment firm. The firm’s Classic Series A investment strategy helps entrepreneurs build global, category-leading companies in the enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application market that is expected to generate more than USD50 billion by 2018.
Cloud Apps Capital Partners has closed more than USD50 million in an oversubscribed first fund, raised from leading institutional investors, technology executives and investors. Cloud Apps Capital Partners is different from most early-stage firms in that 75 percent of its first fund is derived from institutional investors, who typically do not invest in first funds. Cloud Apps Capital’s first fund will reserve for follow-on financings and includes a co-investment structure to support portfolio companies’ growth throughout each company’s lifecycle with capital from leading institutional investors.
To date the firm has invested in seven companies, all examples of cloud business application companies and its investment strategy. The portfolio includes:
• Hootsuite, the leading global social media management platform;
• ServiceMax, the leading field service management software provider and a pioneer of an enterprise cloud company that has become the global category leader;
• Insightly, the business freemium CRM leader, which helps hundreds of thousands of companies around the world manage their customers;
• Dasheroo, a business freemium company solving a global need for easy-to-use business dashboards; and
• GoFormz, a mobile enterprise platform that makes it easy for business users to modernize how they work.
“The venture market today is not optimised for cloud business application companies. New business application companies require more capital and more board support than the seed market can provide,” says Holleran. “Large venture firms would like to see more traction prior to investing. We know firsthand what it takes to build category-leading business application companies, and we help the entrepreneur to put the fundamentals in place to be successful. We are leading a change in the venture industry with our market-focused Classic Series A approach, and we expect to see more new market-focused venture firms in other categories."
