This week marks a major milestone for Jump Capital with the launch of our largest and most ambitious fund to date. We are very excited to announce the closing of our 7^th venture fund with a total capital commitment of $350mm.

Similar to our previous funds, this new fund will focus on early-stage investments in the fast evolving sectors of Fintech, IT/Data Infrastructure, Future of Commerce & Media, and B2B SaaS but will have an increased concentration on the evolving crypto ecosystem.

Jump Capital began nine years ago with the premise that highly engaged investors with extensive operating backgrounds could create differentiated value for early-stage tech entrepreneurs in addition to capital. This simple objective continues to be our guiding principle: how we run our firm, conduct ourselves as investors, build the team and support our investments with our operating platform.

At that time, we were fortunate to have partnered with Jump Trading, a global technology, trading, and research powerhouse to launch our initial fund. We saw a compelling market opportunity to invest in software and technology companies in geographies largely ignored by the coastal VC’s and to provide capital nationally to the under-served series A/B stage.

While we continue to work toward that ambitious goal, even with a 7^th fund we know this journey is just beginning. We consider ourselves truly privileged to have partnered with so many amazing founders and have backed some of the most promising ideas of the last decade. With over 100 investments and nearly 30 successful exits, we have been a highly active investor creating returns to our expanding investor base. And of course, it’s nice to see our entrepreneurs win with exits like Personal Capital (Empower), Flashpoint (Audax), TubiTV (Fox) or the recent/pending IPOs of companies like SPIRE or Fast Radius as well as rocket ship success stories like M1 Finance, Degreed, Tradingview, Logicgate or LinkSquares.

Our approach of being a thesis-led investor has been a key underpinning of our investment strategy and enables us to be good partners for entrepreneurs. The team engages with industry leaders dissecting trends and micro-markets in our focus sectors to uncover opportunity and then hunts for compelling entrepreneurs to back whose vision aligns with our perspective of the opportunity. Being deep in the sub-sector has truly helped us engage with entrepreneurs better and hopefully accelerates their ability to achieve the company potential. We could detail this effort and the areas we are hunting within, but candidly we have been increasingly external with blogs and our podcast and it’s perhaps more interesting to detail what’s changing for this new fund.

Since Day 1, our core ethos has been to remain nimble and adapt to evolving market conditions. In today’s market, access to series A/B capital has compressed significantly, while the interest in Midwest startups from our coastal VC brethren increased amid COVID-19. Additionally, our sectors of focus have also evolved. One thing we could not have anticipated back in 2012 was the emergence of a generation-defining technology paradigm called blockchain computing with the potential to reshape existing financial markets and further introduce many new economic models of value and ownership transfer. We were early students and began to grasp the seismic changes that could accompany broadscale adoption. We began investing in the crypto sector seven years ago with increasing interest and velocity and have now matured our efforts into a dedicated (and growing) crypto investment team led by our partners, Saurabh Sharma and Peter Johnson. The unique confluence of the team’s strength in distributed systems, computing infrastructure, fintech/capital markets and 7 years of investing and studying the crypto landscape has enabled us to double down on these efforts.

Today, alongside our sister firm Jump Trading, we have now become a global investor and key player in this nascent space. Our conviction in crypto has rapidly grown as we witness the convergence of market adoption with both retail and institutional participants, the speed of entrepreneurs to build and iterate and the collision of traditional & digital worlds. Our team has made dozens of investments across the landscape of infrastructure supporting crypto adoption, including global exchanges for fiat onboarding, lending and credit platforms, risk and compliance software, and asset management platforms. We are also a very active investor in crypto-native modalities ranging from early-stage projects to later-stage crypto networks across all areas, including base infrastructure layers, DeFi, Gaming and Web 3.0. Ultimately, we believe that we are in the early stages of this technology innovation and accordingly have dedicated the team and resources in this new fund to enable these entrepreneurs.

At this seminal moment with the launch of our new fund and alongside our portfolio company partners, we couldn’t be prouder of what we have collectively built. We look forward with great enthusiasm to meeting and backing the next generation of tech entrepreneurs redefining the future.

Big things to come!

Mike and Sach