Ehrenberg’s ‘Big Data’-Focused IA Ventures Nears Close on $110M Fund II

Less than a year after raising a $50 million debut fund, New York-based IA Ventures has raised nearly 90% of a second fund with a $110 million target.

The firm has closed on $97.75 million for IA Venture Strategies Fund II LP, according to an SEC document filed today. The filing doesn’t name limited partners in the new fund, but firm founder Roger Ehrenberg (pictured) has reportedly said LPs in the first fund included Cendana Capital, TIFF and Horsley Bridge.

PeHUB sent an email to Ehrenberg seeking comment. We will update this post if he responds.

IA Ventures, which debuted in December 2010, invests in companies “focused on Big Data tools, technologies and applications,” Ehrenberg wrote in his blog last March. “We establish our initial position at the seed stage, either as first-money in investors or perhaps following a small friends-and-family round.”

The firm has invested the first fund quickly. Its website shows that it already has 19 companies in its portfolio, including BankSimple, BillGuard, Kohort, Metamarkets, Sulia, The Trade Desk and Yipit.

Ehrenberg started out in the hedge fund business before turning to venture capital. At one time, he was CEO of DB Advisors, Deutsche Bank’s internal hedge fund trading platform “where his 130-person team managed $6 billion in capital across multiple strategies with offices in New York, London and Hong Kong,” according to his bio on IA Ventures’ website.

Before starting IA Ventures, Ehrenberg was an angel investor with seed stage firm IA Capital Partners from 2004 to 2009. During that time, he seeded 40 companies, including Invite Media (sold to Google), MyTrade (sold to TD Ameritrade), TweetDeck (sold to Twitter) and Wallstrip (sold to CBS Interactive), the website states.

Ehrenberg currently sits on the boards of six companies — BankSimple, Datasift, Kinetic Global Markets, Metamarkets, Recorded Future, and The Trade Desk.