The Best Emerging Funds for Strategic Venture Capital

Emerging Funds have flooded the markets. Thanks to new platforms that make it easier to launch a fund like AngelList’s Rolling Funds product, and the emergence of the Operator-slash-VC, traditional early-stage financing is becoming a lot more diversified.

This has made it easier for tech companies to raise money due to the availability of strategic funding. Funds with unique specializations around particular functions (ie. the LP network is exclusively proven SaaS CROs) can augment the skillsets of a founding team and supercharge companies that hinge on that function.

At SignalFire, we often collaborate or come across a lot of these strategic early-stage-focused firms. So, we wanted to give them a shout-out! Here’s a list of Emerging Funds we’ve seen provide a ton of value in strategic areas that are critical to early-stage success:

Sales & Marketing - GTMfund

• The GTMfund is comprised of an LP base of over 250 GTM leaders who’ve “been there, done that”. They help B2B companies scale revenue and provide knowledge and hiring support to portfolio Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams.
• Notable investments: Vanta, Atlan, Census, Mutiny, Writer, CaptivateIQ

Diversity and Inclusion - Overlooked Ventures

• Venture capital is overlooking massive opportunities. In fact, $4 trillion is being left on the table by not investing in diverse founders. Overlooked Ventures is removing barriers for early-stage founders, accepting and assessing all opportunities equally, and investing in untapped talent.
• Notable investments: Pipe, Stagger, West Tenth, Prometeo, Couplet Coffee, Infinite Objects

Marketplaces & Consumer - Moving Capital

• MovingCapital is a venture capital firm backed by early employees of Uber and other decacorn marketplace and consumer startups.
• Notable investments: Unit, Metropolis, Lumos, Lime, JOKR, Fonoa

People & Talent - SemperVirens

• SemperVirens is an early-stage ecosystem fund investing in workforce technology, healthcare technology, and financial technology companies that sell to and through employers. Their network of thought-leading HR advisors provides a critical sounding board for portfolio companies during early growth. These advisors serve as HR, people ops, and talent executives at enterprise and consumer companies like Slack, Cisco, Peloton, and Pinterest.
• Notable investments: Spring Health, Ladder, Cleo, Human Interest, Carrot, ChartHop

Crypto & Web3 - Shima Capital

• Shima Capital is a global early-stage firm focused on supporting cutting-edge blockchain startups. They provide pre-seed companies with in-house resources purpose-built for building in web3 relating to talent, community, research, and tokenomics.
• Notable investments: Algorand, Bitclout, Hedera Hashgraph, KlimaDAO, Polkadot, Synthetix

Product & UX - Chapter One

• Chapter One helps founders build products for their category-defining stories, including newer investments in the Web3 space. They are a group of former product and user experience operators from successful software companies.
• Notable investments: Dapper, Compound, Lolli, Stytch, Alt, Blockfolio

Foundational Infra & Devtools - Essence VC

• Essence is an early-stage VC fund solely focused on infrastructure and dev tools. They help technical founders with storytelling, community building, leadership development, and scaling their engineering teams.
• Notable Investments: Flatfile, Iterative, Datafold, Opstrace, Sardine, Metaphor

How SignalFire Helps

Emerging VCs and institutional funds can complement each other well to pair vertical specialization with broad company-building help. At our own fund SignalFire, we write lead checks across sectors from seed to Series B while working hard to differentiate ourselves through our platform of value-adds. It’s centered around Beacon Talent, our proprietary AI recruiting system that tracks half a trillion data points to rank hundreds of millions of tech workers on skill and hireability. Beacon lets us give portfolio companies reports of the best people for any role that are the most likely to leave their job, and it’s how we make 1000 job candidate intros to our companies each year.

We also offer a network 85+ invested-advisors ranging from the Instagram founders to the head of pricing for Salesforce, a data science team that generates customer lead lists, and 100+ educational events per year where mentors teach our companies any skillset they need. Finally, we staff full-time in-house experts to help our companies including former Stripe CMO Jim Stoneham for go-to-market, former Netflix Chief Talent Officer Tawni Cranz for company culture building, former head of Special Project Recruiting at Facebook Mike Mangini for hiring strategy, and former Editor-at-Large of TechCrunch Josh Constine for PR and content marketing.

Put it all together and 85% of our portfolio companies say we’re their most valuable investor, and they give us a Net Promoter Score of 92 when few venture funds even measure NPS. You can learn more about how SignalFire helps in this video. We’d love to hear about what you’re building or what your fund is backing, as our lead checks can be a great complement to amazing emerging funds like those above!