Costanoa Venture Capital has formally launched with a USD100m early-stage fund.
The firm will focus on providing series A and seed investments from USD500,000 to USD3m in cloud-based services for businesses and consumers leveraging data and analytics.
Founder and managing partner Greg Sands (pictured) started the firm after more than a decade of investing in cloud-based services, such as Allbusiness.com, Feedburner, Merced Systems, QuinStreet, and Youku.
Recognising that angels and larger VCs are not always equipped to play an active and engaged, long-term role in nascent start-ups, Costanoa’s mission is to be a hands-on, value-added partner to early stage entrepreneurs in its core sectors. Costanoa is providing entrepreneurs with a combination of "right-sized" investments and hands on support.
Costanoa’s portfolio has 10 investments to date, including: Datalogix, DemandBase, Guardian Analytics, Inflection, Intacct, iSocket, Lex Machina, LinkSmart, Return Path, and Risk I/O.
"Costanoa was started with the goal of identifying the most ambitious, talented and passionate entrepreneurs and turning their ideas into great companies," says Sands. "Much of the venture capital that exists today is a momentum game, where investors comfortably ‘deploy capital’ into high-profile companies in high velocity sectors. At Costanoa, we are not chasing momentum, but trying to create it. By identifying and working in sectors before they are saturated, and by undertaking technical projects that require hard work, Costanoa is creating value for its portfolio of companies leading the data revolution."
