What a quarter! We announced the close of Acadian Ventures Fund II. More on that below. Now...back to work! We completed 2 new investments in the quarter and planning for a very busy Q2. The markets remain resilient and we are expect VC investment to continue to rebound in 2024. In this newsletter, we highlight a number of updates over the last quarter and share some of the recent venture capital investment trends.
🚀 Acadian Ventures Closes $30 Million Fund II
In January, we announced the close of Acadian Ventures Fund II, a $30 million seed-stage fund. Our focus and strategy remain unchanged and we strive to be the most meaningful partner to our founders. You can read about the announcement and check out the coverage in VentureBeat here.
📰 Our Investment in FORA
We are excited to share our latest investment in FORA, an innovative executive relationship management (ERM) platform poised to transform C-suite decision-making. FORA emerged from stealth in January, announcing a $3.8M pre-seed funding round led by Converge, with participation from Acadian Ventures, Everywhere Ventures, and GTMfund. Read more about FORA here and learn why we invested here.
🇩🇪 Our Investment in Kombo
We are thrilled to share our recent investment in Kombo. Kombo makes it easy for companies to integrate their entire HR technology stack. Kombo is one of the fastest growing companies that we've seen, growing to over $1M ARR in less than a year. Kombo was not actively raising capital at the time of our investment. Kombo previously raised $2.5M led by 468 Capital. Read more about our investment here.
🇺🇸 Compa Announces Series A
Compaannounced their $10M Series A led by Storm Ventures with participation from Penny Jar Capital, Acadian Ventures, Base10 Partners, and HR Tech Investments LLC (Indeed). Compa was the 15th investment in our first fund. When we first invested in Compa's Seed round in 2021, founders Charlie Franklin, Joe Malandruccolo, and Taylor Cone had a big vision to enable fair and competitive compensation for everyone. The vision has evolved and Compa is now enabling the best companies to leverage real-time market data to win the best talent and grow their workforce. Learn more about our investment in Compa and their Series A announcement in Techcrunch here.
🎪 Acadian Ventures at Transform
Last month, we attended Transform in Las Vegas. Transform has become one of our favorite conferences of the year. At this year's event, we participated on a number of panel discussions including "Funding the Future: Investor Predictions for Workforce Evolution" with fellow investors from Sapphire Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and ADP Ventures. You can check out a replay of our session here.
📅 Acadian Ventures Annual Meeting in Q2
We are excited to announce our inaugural Acadian Ventures Annual Meeting on June 4-5 in San Francisco. This year's event brings together our founders, limited partners, advisors, and co-investors to network, share insights, and learn about the progress of our companies. For more information and registration, please visit our event website. Registration is by invitation only.
We are moving out of the "VC Winter" and in to the "VC Spring." Overall, VC investment in work technologies reached $843M in Q1 2024, ▲47% from last quarter. 32 investments were made during the quarter up slightly from Q4 2023...
Seed stage venture capital remains resilient with around $100M typically invested in any given quarter. In Q1 2024, $95M was deployed in seed stage, 🔻3.5% from the last quarter. We expect seed stage investment to remain strong in 2024...
Early stages (Series A & B) continues to recover although down in the quarter. Early stage VC investment reached $223M, 🔻18% since Q4 2023. Interestingly, we are seeing strength in Series A investments while Series B investments remains difficult...
Late stage VC investment saw a strong rebound in the last quarter. Late stage VC investment was $430M in the quarter, ▲113% from Q4 2023. Series C round, in particular, improved dramatically and we expect those rounds will continue to be strong.
About Acadian Ventures
Acadian Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm that invests in founders who are leading the work revolution and reimagining how people work in the future. The firm was founded in 2019 and led by Jason Corsello and Thomas Otter, both seasoned operators that have scaled publicly-traded global businesses into market leaders. Acadian Ventures invests globally across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. You can find more information at www.acadianventures.com.
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