Fundamentally Frugal

Founders Fund Cuts to the Chase With Eighth Fund, Gwyneth Paltrow Dives into the World of VCs, and a Startup Looks to Revolutionise CRMs.

Author

Adam from VC Brags
March 03, 2023

Welcome Shareholders,    

In this daily edition of the Brags Newsletter, we'll cover how Founder's Fund is shaking up the Venture Industry by Asking for Less Money, Gwyneth Paltrow Targets Early Stage Startups with Debut Fund, and a UK-based CRM platform looks to take the market by storm. 

So sit back, grab a snack, and enjoy!

Venture Today 👏

  • Founders Fund has reduced the target size of its eighth venture capital fund from approximately $1.8 billion to around $900 million. 

Rather than a straightforward decrease in fund size, the $1 billion will be directed towards a ninth venture capital fund, which will be triggered once Fund VIII is fully committed, activating management fees.

By cutting the fund size, Founders Fund will put pressure on other VCs to either cut back or explain why they aren't raising less (since valuations and check sizes have largely declined over the last year). However, Despite some discussion during a group call with investors, Founders Fund has decided not to decrease the size of its second growth fund, which was raised in tandem with its flagship and remains at $3.4 billion.

Who's Raising?

  • Venture Firm Kinship, which is led by Actress and beauty industry entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow, is looking to raise $75 million for its debut fund to invest in early-stage startups. 

Gwyneth Paltrow, is also known for creating lifestyle brands Goop and Moj Mahdara and launching the Beautycon event. Kinship Ventures, headquartered in Los Angeles and established in 2021, is looking to make investments in startups across education technology, health technology, beauty, essentials, and wellness.

The venture firm first made its first investment last year in the cryptocurrency payment platform Moonpay alongside other notable investors, including Ashton Kutcher, Bruce Willis, Eva Longoria, Justin Bieber, Jason Derulo, Paris Hilton, Matthew McConaughey, and Snoop Dogg. Kinship will look to primarily invest its new funds into early-stage consumer goods and technology companies, including Web3 startups, with typical investments between $500,000 and $3 million. 

Startup of the Day

  • London, UK-based provider of a data-driven CRM platform Attio has just raised $23.5 million through a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from existing investors Balderton Capital and Point Nine.

Attio is a CRM with a data model built for business workflows and structures. Upon first use, it syncs with a business' email and calendar systems to create complete profiles, timelines of interactions, and relationship strength intelligence. The company integrates this with external data sources through APIs and first-party integrations, and teams can sort and filter millions of customer records instantly.

Attio has over 2,000 customers across 100 counties, including the likes of OpenAI, Casual, Pallet, On-Deck, and Coca-Cola. The company wants to differentiate itself from other CRMs through its performance and low price (the highest tier is $119/per user/per month). 

Memes and Other Things

How was today's newsletter?

Give us your honest opinion. We really don't mind.