Vermilion Cliffs Ventures introduced Wednesday the shut of a $25 million Fund II. The agency was based in 2023 by operator-turned-investor Ashley Smith, who runs it as one of many few solo ladies GPs in enterprise capital. Chatting with TechCrunch, Smith mentioned this fund will proceed the agency’s thesis of backing technical founders, particularly these constructing in AI infrastructure, safety, and dev instruments.
It took her round 4 months to boost the brand new fund this yr, she mentioned, with a lot of the capital coming from current buyers. The typical test dimension for Fund II might be between $500,000 and $1 million, and it hopes to put money into a minimum of 25 firms over the following two and a half years, having already backed six firms. The agency beforehand raised a $13 million debut fund that backed 35 firms, together with the cybersecurity startup Keycard and the AI infrastructure firm CopilotKit.
Smith mentioned that many early-stage companies are there to assist founders elevate the following spherical, and from her expertise working in advertising and marketing at Twilio, Fb, GitHub, and GitLab, she hopes to assist founders with go-to-market methods that assist them earn in. “Promoting to builders and safety groups is its personal self-discipline, and most founders study it the costly manner with time,” she mentioned. “I attempt to assist them skip errors I’ve made or seen different founders make.”
