Foundry 2022 will be our final Foundry fund. 

While VC firms rarely make decisions like this, it’s precisely what we planned to do when we started Foundry in 2006. From our founding, we intentionally decided not to build a legacy or generational firm —one meant to live beyond the tenure of the founding partners. Instead, we intended to focus on the work of investing, re-evaluating each potential new fund as our fundraising cadence required. For nearly 20 years now, that cadence has been to raise a new fund every three to four years. Each time, we make a deliberate decision to raise a subsequent fund. But not this time.

Choosing not to be a legacy firm is one way we’ve challenged norms in the venture industry and just one of many things we take pride in as we reflect back upon our time building Foundry. As a Colorado-based firm, we were early believers that great companies could be built anywhere and, while we’ve made numerous investments in Silicon Valley, we’ve also invested up and down both coasts and many places in between. We have always believed that venture capital should be inclusive and accessible instead of opaque and one-sided, and we have actively worked to bring transparency to our industry through our writing, speaking, and other media. We are passionate advocates for the power of entrepreneurship, believing in its ability to transform people and communities, and have tried to be supportive of entrepreneurs around the country and the world, even when we weren’t direct investors. We located our firm in Boulder, Colorado, where we helped to co-found Techstars and joined local entrepreneurs, technologists, and educators to catalyze a thriving startup community – one that has served as a model for other startup communities around the country and the world. 

In 2015, with a changing venture landscape, we saw an opportunity to institutionalize a practice of investing in other venture firms, expanding upon the personal investing in venture that we had been doing for years. We launched this fund investment strategy in 2016 and built a portfolio of both established and emerging seed-stage managers who we believe represent some of the best of the newest generation of investors. 

As we’ve built Foundry, we’ve had the privilege of doing this work in partnership with an incredible network of founders, operators, VCs, and Limited Partners, investing in over 200 companies and nearly 50 venture firms. 

With each new fund, an early-stage venture firm extends its life by at least a decade, more realistically, quite a bit longer than that. Over the past year, as we reflected on what we each wanted for our future, we kept the original idea for Foundry front of mind. We’ve had several moments over the last decade where we thought the fund we were raising might be our last. Each of those times, after reflection and discussion, we decided to raise another fund. 

But not this time. Foundry 2022 will be our last fund.

However, our work is not finished. We’re excited to make new investments out of Foundry 2022, from which we will continue to lead Series A and B financings. We are energized to continue supporting our portfolio of companies and funds. And, given the lifespan of venture funds, we expect to continue this work for at least the next decade. Our work continues to energize us, and we are as committed as ever to the mission of Foundry – building a network of entrepreneurs, investors, and LPs that benefits everyone in our ecosystem.  

We greatly appreciate the many people with whom we have had the opportunity to work, especially our LPs, who have supported us along the way. We hope you feel we have been good stewards of your capital. We will continue to work extremely hard to generate returns for you. We feel incredibly lucky to have had the chance to work with so many amazing founders, CEOs, management teams, and co-investors. There’s a lot of work left to do, and we’re excited for it. 

We are pleased to announce our investment in Vendasta’s CAD 20m financing. In connection with the financing, the company will convert a CAD 52.5m debenture to equity and subsequently have no outstanding debt. Vendasta is led by co-founder and CEO Brendan King, a multi-time entrepreneur who started the company 15 years ago.

Vendasta is a scaled B2B SaaS company that sells marketing, sales, and other software solutions to SMB customers (SaaS SMB) via a well-developed reseller channel. The SMB market is a particularly challenging one to sell to, and the venture-backed landscape is littered with companies that have tried to sell point solutions, specialized products, or proprietary solutions directly to SMB customers and have yet to scale successfully. Vendasta’s reseller channel is a key differentiating factor that has allowed it to unlock the SaaS SMB market successfully.

We got to know Vendasta through their acquisition of Yesware, one of our portfolio companies with a SaaS SMB customer base for sales enablement. After that acquisition, we began discussing Broadly, another company in our portfolio with a SaaS SMB customer base. Vendasta acquired Broadly, and soon after, we expressed interest in investing additional capital directly in Vendasta.

Vendasta is a company we think of as a Silent Killer. While not widely known in the broader venture community, Vendasta has built a sizable, unique business that solves a crucial part of the problem of selling SaaS software to SMBs. 

We are excited to be part of helping Vendasta on the next stage of its journey.

This week our friends at Springbank announced their debut fund with $35 million in capital commitments, and we are thrilled to partner with them. Courtney, Elana, and Jen were introduced to us by our partners at Union Square Ventures as they began putting together their new fund. We couldn’t be happier to share the news of their initial fund.

Springbank is an early-stage venture fund building the infrastructure to support women and working families. The companies they are backing are building the tools, products, and services that define the future of inclusive work, the new care economy, and the next wave of financial progress. They started Springbank with a singular belief that the needs of women and working families were under-estimated, under-innovated, and under-invested.  Areas like flexible and remote work, care infrastructure, women’s health, and the financial health and productivity of households have historically been viewed as “women’s issues” and therefore nice – but not need – to have.  Their perspective is that these are in fact “everyone issues” that greatly impact our society, labor markets, and economy at large. Since starting Springbank in 2019 they have partnered with incredible founders actively building for a more equal future, including: Carefull, Copper Banking, Daivergent, Dandi, Great Wrap, Guaranteed, Little Otter, PlantBaby, Season Health, Summer Health, Wellthy.

Springbank is a great example of our network-driven model of investing, and we look forward to continuing our close partnership with them. Congratulations, Courtney, Elana, and Jen! You can read more about their new fund here and here.

We are pleased to announce that we have raised a new fund to continue our network-driven investing. Foundry 2022 is a $500 million fund that invests in early-stage technology companies and early-stage venture funds. We began investing the fund in 2022 and are excited to continue partnering with founders, GPs, and LPs.

We transitioned to our network-driven strategy in 2016 with the first Foundry Next fund. Since then, we’ve had the privilege of building our partner fund portfolio, which includes a fantastic set of established and emerging early-stage investors.

In our 2018 Foundry Next fund, we fully implemented our strategy of investing 75% of our capital directly in early-stage companies and 25% in partner funds. This strategy creates a powerful risk-return model while accruing a structural advantage for direct investing. We patiently invested the 2018 fund over four years, as we had committed to our LPs when we raised it, rather than accelerating our pace and raising multiple funds of two, or even one-year durations. We continue to value time diversification, especially as we’ve seen the market shift over the past 18 months. We’ve lived through several cycles and recognize the opportunity the current environment, combined with time diversity, provides.

Since our inaugural 2007 fund, we’ve focused on several themes to guide our investing. The themes have evolved through our experiences and learning during the past 16 years. Today, our investment strategy combines our thematic lens with a network-driven approach. We are focused on companies in our partner funds’ portfolios and use our themes to identify potential investments where we can be additive partners.

The Foundry network is intentionally expansive. We have long believed that important companies can be built anywhere. With a focus on the U.S. and Canada, our national footprint gives us access to a diverse pool of talent and ideas.

We are committed to our way of practicing venture capital. We operate with a “give first” ethos. We aim to be open, conscientious, and steadfast. We care about the people with whom we work. We build community across our network, taking great pride in seeing the leaders in our portfolio help one another. We also try to have fun. We are serious investors but don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Today, Foundry has six partners: Lindel Eakman, Brad Feld, Jaclyn Hester, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Chris Moody. Our partnership is an equal one, with each of us bringing different perspectives and strengths. We are collaborative, having developed deep personal connections that help us work individually and collectively to make the best decisions possible. 

We deeply appreciate the Limited Partners in our new fund. We have long relationships with many of our LPs, which remains a source of professional and personal pride. We are grateful to continue working on their behalf.

Finally, we want to recognize the incredible founders and GPs who have allowed us to invest in their companies and funds. We do not take lightly the great privilege of partnering with extraordinary builders and investors and are thrilled at the opportunity to continue this work.

We’re excited to announce our investment in MacroFab’s Series C financing alongside Edison Partners and BMW Ventures. MacroFab was introduced to us by our partner firm, Techstars, who participated in its seed round in 2015 and we’ve been following the company’s impressive progress ever since. MacroFab is a cloud-enabled electronics manufacturing platform built to automate and optimize the manufacturing process. The company’s platform has a modern, easy to use interface to take information directly from the customer to the manufacturing floor, enabling clients to reduce the up-front cost and complexity of getting manufacturing jobs running. This is especially relevant in today’s market as companies are looking for manufacturing solutions in the face of supply chain issues. Founded in Houston, Texas in 2013 by current Chief Product Officer, Chris Church, and Lead Electrical Designer, Parker Dillmann, MacroFab simplifies manufacturing with a software-driven approach to building electronics at scale.

We have been interested in this space for some time. The digital manufacturing market is growing, fueled by the need for redundancy and resilience from off-shore manufacturing. Macrofab addresses those challenges facing engineers, purchasers, and supply chains by bringing together the best factories in North America and production expertise thus providing seamless and transparent manufacturing from prototype to fulfillment. MacroFab’s cloud platform enables next generation manufacturing with factory elasticity, supply chain resilience, inventory management, along with better cost control and time to market. With hundreds of production lines, transparent communication, and real-time manufacturing data, MacroFab is leading the emerging digital manufacturing market. 

MacroFab’s strong executive team is led by Misha Govshteyn, who previously co-founded and built Alert Logic into one of the fastest growing companies in the security industry with over 4,000 customers, $140M+ in revenue. After serving on MarcoFab’s board, Misha joined co-founders, Chris and Parker, as the company’s CEO and has built a powerhouse team of operations, product, and marketing leaders. Their customer list includes Tesla, Amazon, Stanley Black & Decker, and Dow among many others. We are thrilled to partner with MacroFab as they build innovative solutions for electronics manufacturing and fulfillment.