SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Artisanal Ventures, a venture capital firm focusing on high growth B2B cloud startups, today announced the closing of its oversubscribed inaugural fund, Artisanal Ventures I, LP, at $62 million. Artisanal Ventures shares its Founder, Andy Price, with Artisanal Talent, one of the fastest growing cloud-focused executive search firms in the world. Investors in the fund include an all-star roster of over 50 iconic Founders and senior executives from highly successful companies like Square, Atlassian, CrowdStrike, AppDynamics, Snowflake, Splunk, UiPath, MuleSoft and others.
“I’ve been investing in Founders and helping them build great companies for decades. Raising a proper fund was the obvious next step,” said Andy Price, Founding General Partner of Artisanal Ventures. “Recently, we recognized a huge shift in the VC market. Founders can go one of two ways: a high value syndicate where investors dig in and work on their behalf in areas like recruiting and sales, or they go for the highest price, letting hedge funds bid up their companies to inflated valuations. We think the market is pivoting strongly in our direction and back to our partner firms, who are top tier traditional VC players.”
Artisanal’s capital and investor base serve as complements to the industry’s best performing firms that work with Mr. Price’s search firm to build exceptional teams. The intention is not to compete with the venture ecosystem, but rather to enhance it. That formula has resulted in more than half a trillion dollars of market value in the last four years.
“We have a truly unfair advantage over most investors, because Founders trust us very deeply. We get daily, meaningful signal from them, as they know we are completely aligned with them in helping them to nail the hardest work, which is team-building,” added Mr. Price. “So we know exactly when to invest and who is going to drive a big outcome based on this constant, intimate interaction we get to have with Founders.”
Artisanal Ventures invests relatively small amounts of capital, typically $500K to $3.5M, into highly promising companies that are all high growth opportunities. It then leverages the expertise of its LP base and deploys its best-in-class executive search capabilities to help these companies build truly transformative teams, unlocking their potential to be leaders in their industry. This is why the win rate of the firm is abnormally high.
“Every single Founder wakes up each day worrying about whether or not they can build a winning team, and they want meaningful advice from A+ people who have built special companies. We offer them both,” Mr. Price added. “Yes, we can build a great team, but our Limited Partners include a who’s who of operators who have built some of the most successful technology companies in history. Their counsel to our portfolio companies is just as useful as our recruiting apparatus, and in some cases even more so. They are the core of our ultra-connected capital model.”
“Over my 30-year career, I’ve been fortunate to work alongside and with some of the world’s best venture capital partners and have seen firsthand the need for the approach that Artisanal Ventures drives with their high value-add and unique approach” said Doug Merritt, the former CEO of Splunk, who grew the company to billions of revenues and tens of billions in market value. Mr. Merritt is the firm’s first Venture Partner, and major LP, actively scouting, evaluating and mentoring startups in the cloud security, DevOps and data platforms categories.
Mr. Price founded Artisanal Talent in 2018 and is globally recognized for the spectacular successes of the firm’s clientele, such as Snowflake, Amplitude, HashiCorp, Gitlab, Marqeta, and Confluent. Operating the fund alongside Mr. Price is Co-Founder and Partner Andrew Van Nest. A graduate of Harvard University, and former professional basketball player, Mr. Van Nest was previously a venture investor at Blumberg Capital, worked in a highly successful software startup and spent time in investment banking prior to co-Founding this fund.
“We are thinking big, but starting small,” said Mr. Van Nest. “While we are ambitious and believe our strategy could successfully deploy at least a billion dollars, we want to prove this model can outperform. I’ve studied the VC ecosystem for a decade and have never seen a firm operate the way we can, and do.”
With its unique value proposition, the Fund has won allocation in over 90 percent of deals it has pursued to date, and secured investments in more than a dozen companies, including Abnormal Security, Benchling, Cohere, Transmit Security, and Lithic, among other top tier portfolio companies.
About Artisanal Ventures
Artisanal Ventures helps Founders build the next generation of leading B2B cloud computing companies through capital investment and recruitment of world class leadership teams. Through its Connected Capital model, Artisanal invests along top venture capital firms and leverages its industry leading search business and LP network of iconic founders and executives to create exceptional outcomes.
For more information, visit Artisanal Ventures or follow on LinkedIn.
