Scale Venture Partners has raised $400m to back software companies that are creating the future of work.
Scale Venture Partners VI, which raised capital from new and existing LPs, will have a special focus on such trends as “Cloud x AI”. The venture capital firm’s predecessor closed on $335m in January 2016.
The new fund will continue the firm’s strategy, which has previously included investments in fleet management solutions provider KeepTruckin, autonomous mobile robots business Locus Robotics, artifact repository manager Frog, and data management software vendor DataStax.
The firm has made a number of investments into the FinTech space over the years. One of the company’s it has invested in is Bill.com, a digital payment processing platform helping businesses to pay bills and send invoices. The company recently surpassed $50bn in business payments processed annually, and launched a new international payment service.
In the RegTech space Scale has previously backed electronic signature technology solution DocuSign and personal data protection business BigID.
Partner Rory O’Driscoll said in a blog post: “The major technology trend for the past twenty years has been the platform shift to the cloud. That move is not yet complete but cloud software is a crowded, competitive and fast maturing market. The big story for the next twenty years will be about the addition of meaningful elements of artificial intelligence to make cloud software and the humans that use it, more productive.”
Last month, Scale Ventures led a $30m Series B round for data protection startup BigID. Based in New York and Tel Aviv with a European office in London, BigID uses advanced machine learning and identity intelligence to help enterprises protect their customer and employee data at petabyte scale.
Its technology helps organisations replace inaccurate survey and spreadsheet-based privacy compliance with data-centric enterprise privacy management.
“We see huge change in the markets we invest in, but strong continuity in when and where we invest,” O’Driscoll added. “Our focus remains on software companies that have achieved product market fit with early customers. At this point every software company has to make a cultural shift from being solely a product company to being both a product and a go-to-market company.”
To help companies grow, Scale has launched Scale Studio, a platform to support the growth of private cloud companies. The studio will provide access to a targeted, trended, and actionable set of insights to allow a company to compare its performance to other companies when they were at a similar stage of growth. Scale Studio is actively in beta and is planned to launch general availability in the fall.
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