Bling Capital, one of many extra prolific and well-connected seed VC companies, has nabbed one other $270 million for a brand new flagship fourth fund. About half of these contemporary hundreds of thousands are earmarked for its alternative fund, cash put aside to make follow-on investments into winners, Bling basic associate Kyle Lui tells TechCrunch.
Bling is the agency based in 2018 by Ben Ling, a former basic associate at Khosla Ventures, the place he backed such firms as Gitlab and Webflow. He earned his Valley road cred from exec roles at Google, YouTube, and Fb. He additionally turned such a stellar angel investor (Airtable, Lyft, Sq., Palantir, others), that it’s clear that seed investing is his true calling.
These experiences formed his VC agency which operates what it calls a Product Council, a community of leaders at main tech companies that assist advise Bling’s startups. With the brand new fund, the agency’s community is including advisors to its roster from a bunch of the most popular startups together with from Notion, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Stripe.
All informed, Ling has corralled about 19 unicorns beneath his belt. Lui, who was beforehand a associate at DCM, has notched at the very least 7 unicorns, together with names like DocSend and Hims.
In its six years, Bling has already invested in 170 firms, it says, together with such names as Rippling, and Vise. The brand new fund isn’t an enormous step up from its final one, which launched about two years in the past. That one was $212 million whole, additionally break up almost evenly between a brand new seed fund and a chance fund.
