MaC Venture Capital wraps sophomore fund for underserved founders

MaC Venture Capital, a majority-Black-owned venture capital firm, has raised $203 million for its second seed-stage fund.

Based in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, MaC Venture Capital will use Fund II to back technology startups focused on helping underserved communities. The firm now has $412 million in assets under management, according to a statement.

Commitments to Fund II come from repeat and new institutional investors such as Fairview Capital, George Kaiser Family Foundation, Goldman Sachs, ICG Advisors, Illumen Capital, the MacArthur Foundation, Stepstone, the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois and the University of Michigan.

The venture firm’s general partners include Marlon Nichols; former Washington, DC mayor Adrian Fenty; former William Morris Agency talent agent and investor Michael Palank; and Charles King, founder and chief executive of Macro, an entertainment company. Prior to forming MaC Venture Capital, the four founders collectively invested in more than 135 companies.

MaC Venture Capital is the result of a 2019 merger between Cross Culture Ventures, co-founded by Nichols, and M Ventures, co-founded by Fenty, King and Palank.

As of the launch of the seed-stage fund, MaC Venture Capital has invested in 50 companies, including Pipe, Edge Delta, Stoke, Zigazoo, Epsilon3 and Spartan Radar.

“Nearly doubling our seed-stage funding is incredibly validating and showcases how investors believe in our vision, and see the hard work our team and portfolio companies are putting in every day,” Adrian Fenty, managing general partner, said in a statement. “We’re supporting the next generation of companies, like Spora Health and Avala, who are bridging gaps in access and opportunities, and our investors are trusting in our cultural investment framework which guides our investment strategies.”

In the statement about the new fund, MaC said diversity is a core part of its investment strategy and leadership. It noted that 36 percent of its portfolio companies are led by women founders, and 69 percent have BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) founders. Mac also pointed out that its “investment team embodies the same emphasis on diversity, with over half of the team being Black and a quarter are women.”

“MaC Venture Capital understands establishing diversity in leadership is not only the right thing to do, it’s the most strategic investment strategy, too,” Palank said in the statement. “We’ve seen study after study show that diverse organizations perform better than less diverse competitors, but we also know supporting diverse leaders results in companies whose solutions are culturally competent and truly meet the needs of underserved communities – because they, too, are part of those communities.”