F50 and Garage Technology Ventures form new venture fund

F50 has teamed up with Garage Technology Ventures to launch a new venture fund F50 Garage Venture Fund II. The vehicle will focus on “brilliant emerging technology companies that have the potential to have a significant global impact on their target sectors.”

PRESS RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO and SILICON VALLEY, Calif., Aug. 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — F50 and Garage Technology Ventures today announced they will partner to form a new venture fund focused on investing in brilliant emerging technology companies that have the potential to have a significant global impact on their target sectors. The new fund, called F50 Garage Venture Fund II, LP, follows on an earlier $10 million seed fund launched by F50 in 2014.

The F50 Garage Venture Fund aims to leverage the F50 platform, which has quickly become one of the largest online/offline funding platforms in Silicon Valley. The target size for the fund is $100 million, enabling the fund to invest in seed and early-stage companies. While based in Silicon Valley, the fund has a mandate to reach out to entrepreneurs globally to discover emerging technology companies with the potential for global success. It will also seek to build syndicates of top-tier investors around all of its portfolio companies.

“We are delighted to be joining forces with Garage Technology Ventures,” said David Cao, Founder & CEO of F50. “Garage brings to the fund its experience and global reputation as a premier investor in startup companies, as well as an extensive knowledge of how to build successful companies.”

Garage Technology Ventures is best known for its early investments in many successful technology companies, such as Pandora Media, Tripwire, LeftHand Networks, WhiteHat Security, D.light Design and Simply Hired.

“F50 has a novel model for finding and funding emerging technology companies, and the organization has already demonstrated amazing success,” said Bill Reichert, co-founder of Garage Technology Ventures. “Rather than launching another accelerator or another online crowdfunding platform, F50 has created an open model that works with all the players in the ecosystem that enables the best entrepreneurs and the best investors to collaborate to build the best companies–and those are the companies we want to fund with the new F50 Garage Venture Fund.”

The F50 Garage Venture Fund will include David Cao, Bill Reichert and Tel Liu as managing directors.

“Our network of global strategic investors will help those startups to expand into new markets, regions and sectors,” said Tel Liu, co-Founder of F50 who was also EVP at Tencent.

The F50 Garage Venture Fund will invest in up to 100 companies over the next three years, focusing on companies in the IT and software sectors, broadly defined, with opportunistic investments in extraordinary companies in robotics, medical devices, materials science and other sectors.

About F50:
F50 is a private co-investment platform that connects a network of high-quality founders with smart capital. F50’s curated platform of select early-stage startups provides deal flow for member investors. F50 will host the Founder World 2015 conference in October together with Google. For more information, visit www.f50.io.

About Garage Technology Ventures:
Garage Technology Ventures is a seed and early-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley. When Garage launched in 1998, the firm pioneered the acceleration model, working intensively with startup companies like Pandora Media and LeftHand Networks, and nearly 100 other startup companies, to help brilliant entrepreneurs build brilliant businesses. For more information about Garage, visit: http://www.garage.com.

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