Serena Capital has announced this week that it has closed its second fund at 100 Million €, which is plans to invest in 15-18 companies with investment ranges between €4-8 Million. Having recently invested with its first fund in Sequans Communications, which IPO-ed on the NYSE in 2011, as well as in industry leaders like Bonitasoft & Augure, Serena Capital reported that it returned a 20% Interest Rate (IR) to its Limited Partners(LPs), 90% of which re-upped their commitment to Serena Capital by investing in their second fund.
“Our sweet spot is our ability to help companies execute and move ahead, to go from 20 to 200 people, from 3 to 50 million in revenue.” – Marc Fournier, Managing Partner @ Serena Capital
Serena’s second fund has been built & shaped to perform exactly as its previous fund did – given the success that they’ve had with the first fund, it’s easy to imagine why. This past year has seen quite a number of VC’s announcing new funds – ISAI recently closed its €50 Million Expansion fund, while Ventech announced a new €75 Million fund earlier this year. Elaia Partners announced its €45 Million Alpha fund last October, and 360 Capital Partners raised a new fund around the same time as well.
Raising a new fund for a VC is quite similar to raising a new round of funding for a startup. Successfully onboarding new LPs while maintains old LPs validates your success and track record, and the very act of closing a new fund can indicate the overall performance in the past 5-7 years (the life-cycle of the previous fund), whether the new fund be larger or smaller and its predecessor, dedicated to larger or smaller investment rounds, etc.
For Serena Capital, the VC fund was quite transparent both to its investors and to journalists about the first funds performance – one acquisition and two partial-exits to-date on the first fund – and they were also quite pleased to say that the legal negotiations of the fund took longer than hunting for investors did. The latter can be quite a laborious process given the economic climate, depending on the performance of the fund.
For now, startups looking to become leaders of their industry are welcome to start reaching out to Serena Capital today. Managing partner Marc Fournier told me in a telephone interview that the company prides itself on its ability to transform a startup into an industry leader through its Partners experiences (all three of Serena Capital’s partners are former French & SV entrepreneurs). Despite their higher investment range, Fournier said that Serena has a tendency to come on board for the first institutional round of funding, meaning they select startups who have already had enough traction on their own to show that they can become a worldwide leader, without having taken on seed & small Series A rounds of funding.