Floodgate Closes Fund IV with $75M
Floodgate, the early stage venture firm founded by angel investor Mike Maples, has raised $75 million for a fourth fund.
PeHUB reported reported Friday that the Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm was raising a fund of that size, citing a securities filing. Today, Maples confirmed that Floodgate has completed fundraising.
“Floodgate has officially closed Floodgate Fund IV,” Maples wrote in an email. “In keeping with our investment strategy, our fund size and investor group has remained the same as with Fund III.”
The firm closed its last fund, a $73.5 million Fund III, in 2010. Since then, Maples and partner Ann Miura-Ko have been investing quite actively, backing rounds for at least 14 startups, according to Thomson Reuters, with a focus on the consumer Internet and software sectors.
Floodgate and Maples have had some large exits in the last couple of years. DemandForce, provider of a marketing and communications software services for local businesses, sold to Intuit in April for $423.5 million. Maples backed the company’s first round in 2007, and Floodgate Fund backed its second round in 2011. Ngmoco, a mobile game developer that Floodgate backed for multiple rounds, sold to Japanese mobile entertainment company DeNA in October, 2010 for $400 million.
The firm and Maples have also been investors in a number of still-private companies that have since raised significant sums of venture capital and seen sharp growth in usage and valuation. The list includes Twitter, online clothing designer Mod Cloth, and textbook rental site Chegg.
Floodgate’s most recent investments include Rally.org, a social fundraising platform, Xamarin, a creator of software development tools for mobile, and Mass Relevance, a provider of social content marketing services. The firm’s strategy is essentially a “super angel” model, investing in early rounds for companies that are beyond seed stage but are looking for something smaller than a typical Series A round.
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