Alven Capital announced this week on their blog that they are “very close to reaching their hard cap of 120M€,” and thus closing their 4th fund, Alven Capital IV. The firm, which has made investments in iAdvize, Drivy, Mailjet, Textmaster, Qosmos, Commerce Guys & more, has been pretty quiet lately, despite a few good exits in the recent months, including Entropysoft to Salesforce &Joliebox to Birchbox. With its most recent investments in November 2012, the team has been hard at work raising its next fund, which shouldn’t be difficult given its previous success.
We are happy to announce that we are currently closing our new fund Alven Capital IV almost at our hard cap of 120 M€.
— Alven (@alvencap) March 7, 2013
Raising funds for VC firms in France has been quite tough in recent months, given the financial climate as well as the lack of exits (due to a relatively longer average startup lifecycle). We wrote recently about 360 Capital’s new fund, which took over a year to get together, and saw a quite large gap in investments. In addition, with new funds like Publicis & Orange’s 500 Million euro fund managed by Iris Capital, it’s going to get harder and harder for VC firms who haven’t hit it big, like Elaia Partners with Criteo, to go back to LPs and ask for a next fund.
Fortunately, it seems that Alven Capital hasn’t been hit with this dilemma. A 5 month gap in investment isn’t nearly worrisome – at best, it gives associates time to focus on their portfolio while the partners go out with cap in hand. If the fund gets wrapped up in the next few weeks, it will line up quite well with the natural spike in investments that tends to occur between April and June. It’s springtime for startups, I guess.
For now, Alven hasn’t made any statement about what its new fund will be used for; however, given their propensity for investing in the 1 Million euro range for series A rounds, I wouldn’t be surprised if they stick to what they’re good at. Their investments have been, historically, 30% B2B & 40% B2C in the web.