Our Newest Fund – Foundry Group Next

We are happy to announce the closing of our sixth fund, Foundry Group Next. The $500 million fund is a continuation of our Foundry Group Select Fund approach but expands on our previous Select Fund strategy with the addition of two important components.

Foundry Group Select allowed us to make growth investments in the most successful companies from our early stage funds. Supporting these existing portfolio companies with meaningful capital in their scale-up phase provides flexibility to our companies and allows us to remain syndication agnostic in our investing.

Foundry Group Next continues this strategy but also gives us the ability to invest in growth stage companies outside of Foundry Group that fit within our thematic investing activities. Over the years, we have seen a meaningful number of attractive growth investments that we could not address given our early stage strategy and original Foundry Group Select strategy. By opening our investment activities to include a small number of growth investments outside of Foundry Group companies, we can take further advantage of the work we’ve done to become experts in our key themes.

Many of these growth opportunities stemmed from our personal investments in other early stage venture funds. We decided to formalize this investing activity in Foundry Group Next by adding Lindel Eakman to our team. Lindel was previously our largest LP while he was at UTIMCO and is now leading our Foundry Group Next investments as an LP in other early stage VC funds.  We are excited to partner with other funds that we respect and strengthen those existing relationships.  We also anticipate that some of their portfolio companies will be candidates for a direct investment from Foundry Group Next.

In Foundry Group Next, we are also happy to welcome a small number of new Limited Partners to our family. We are pleased to partner with such a great group of investors.

We very much look forward to working with another group of great entrepreneurs and VC fund managers in our Foundry Group Next Fund.

– Jason, Ryan, Seth, Brad, and Lindel