Skip to main content
https://www.highperformancecpmgate.com/rgeesizw1?key=a9d7b2ab045c91688419e8e18a006621

XFactor, the early stage VC that invests in women-led startups, raises a second fund

XFactor, the pre-seed and seed-stage VC out of FlyBridge Capital, has today announced that it has raised a second fund of $8.5 million.

XFactor first came on the scene in 2017 with $3 million. FlyBridge Capital partner Chuck Hazard started the fund alongside several female founders who were interested in getting into investment.

The idea is not just to fund startups led by at least one female, but also to give female founders a path into investing.

With Fund 2, XFactor is able to not only increase its check size from $100K to $150K, but it also makes room for more partners at the firm. From Fund 1, XFactor has grown from 9 investment partners to 23, operating in cities like LA, Seattle and Denver alongside original markets of Boston, NY, and SF. Collectively, this group of women has raised more than $550 million in venture capital for their own businesses.

Some notable investments from Fund 1 include Chief, The Riveter, Choosy, CourtBuddy, and MixLab, which today raised an $8.5 million seed round.

The increase in fund size will allow XFactor to invest in 53 companies, and the fund is looking to finance companies in new verticals, such as healthcare, fintech, agtech, and frontier tech.

All of the investors at XFactor, which include Anna Palmer, Kathryn Minshew, Kate Ryder, Danielle Morrill, Allison Koopf, and Aubrey Pagano, work on the fund part-time while running their respective businesses.

“The greatest challenge is managing deal flow, given we’re all operators at our day jobs,” said Anna Palmer, cofounder and CEO of Dough and investment partner at XFactor. “We saw 1,500 opportunities come through on the first fund, and we’re expecting to see the same if not more this time around. The biggest challenge is seeing everything and managing that alongside our day jobs.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant. Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.” “I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.” The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”. Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendatio
Post a Comment
Read more

Drone crash near kids leads Swiss Post and Matternet to suspend autonomous deliveries

A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles. The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the Swiss Post (i.e. the postal service), which was using the craft to dispatch lab samples from one medical center for priority cases. As far as potential applications of drone delivery, it’s a home run — but twice now the craft have crashed, first with a soft landing and the second time a very hard one. The first incident, in January, was the result of a GPS hardware error; the drone entered a planned failback state and deployed its emergency parachute, falling slowly to the ground. Measures were taken to improve the GPS systems. The second failure in May, however, led to the drone attempting to deploy its parachute again, only to sever the line
Post a Comment
Read more

ProtonMail logged IP address of French activist after order by Swiss authorities

ProtonMail , a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation — in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying prem
Post a Comment
Read more