Eniac Ventures has closed two funds worth a total of $220 million, which the seed capital firm shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
New York-based Eniac has raised $60 million for Select 1, the company’s vehicle for subsequent follow-on investments in portfolio companies, and $160 million for Eniac VI. The company has made 11 investments in Select 1, which actually closed in 2021 but has not been publicly disclosed until now. The firm plans to make its first investment in its sixth fund “shortly,” according to co-founder and general partner Nihal Mehta. It is planned to be done about 40 investments in both funds.
For new investments, Eniac’s average check size is $1.5 million. Subsequent checks tend to be larger, Mehta said, with the largest check invested from the Select fund being $6 million.
Eniac is an industry-agnostic company, with Mehta describing the team as “pre-product-market-fit generalists.” Despite being industry agnostic, Eniac has been bitten by the artificial intelligence bug, with Mehta noting that “machine learning and AI have been a dominant theme” for the company over the last decade.
“There is some hype around AI, but we believe it is the most transformative computing wave we have seen since the Internet,” he said.
Portfolio companies include 1up Health, Alloy, Anchor, Attentive, Brightwheel, Embrace, Ghost, Hinge, Hive, Level.ai, Maestro, Owlet and Vungle. Eniac was also an early investor in Airbnb and saw exits from companies such as TapCommerce (to Twitter), Anchor (to Spotify), Dubsmash (to Reddit), Hinge (to IAC), Workflow (to Apple) and Vungle (to Blackstone). ) and Vence (to Merck Animal Health).
Mehta declined to name specific LPs, noting only that they are a mix of “top foundations, endowments, pension funds and funds of funds” and that most of them are “mission-focused.”
Despite the difficult fundraising environment, Mehta said the fundraising was “ironically the fastest” Eniac has done in 15 years.
“We attribute this success to being able to return several funds over the last few years,” he told TechCrunch, declining to provide specific returns figures.
The size of Eniac funds has grown significantly over the years. Eniac raised its first $1.5 million fund in 2010, $100 million for its fourth fund and another in 2017 $125 million for Eniac Fund V in 2021. Over the years, it has supported more than 250 startups.