Looking back at Eniac’s 2021

By Nihal Mehta, Lacey Wisdom, and Anthony Ha

We’ve had a busy year at Eniac Ventures.

Shortly after 2021 began, we announced Eniac V, our $125 million fifth fund. At the time, we said we would continue leading or co-leading seed deals of all sizes, writing checks in SaaS, developer, consumer, and deeptech startups. We also said we would be doubling our team size and doubling down on New York, while remaining open to great founders everywhere.

Since then, we’ve been busy turning those plans into a reality. As a firm, we remain balanced between thesis-driven and opportunistic investments — we have our own convictions about where to find the next big opportunity, but more than anything, with we’re looking for founders with compelling backgrounds and ideas.

So over the past 12 months, we’ve made 14 new core investments — four in developer tooling startups, three in e-commerce tooling, two in the creator economy, two in fintech, and one each in consumer, climate, and security. Three of those startups are headquartered in New York, but we’ve also invested in founders based in Las Vegas and Pittsburgh, and internationally, in India and the United Kingdom.

Alongside those core deals, we’ve adapted to the dizzying acceleration of crypto and web3. Our partners were already investing personally in crypto, but by this fall, we saw the need to develop a new institutional strategy, allowing us to write smaller checks in crypto startups and participate in token offerings, with the long-term goal of making this one of our core investment verticals. We’d like to think we’ve come out of the gate pretty quickly — we’ve already closed seven crypto deals and committed to another five.

At the same time, we’ve been excited to see success stories in our existing portfolio. Owlet and Boxed both went public, while companies like Alloy and mParticle raised impressive follow-on rounds. In fact, our portfolio companies raised a total of $1.25 billion in follow-on funding this year.

And we’ve expanded the team significantly, with four new investment professionals — Dan Jaeck, Claire Rafson, Tim Wang, and Lacey Wisdom. Other additions include Platforms & Operations Associate Regan Gore and Vice President of Content Anthony Ha. (With Anthony on-board, we’ve been publishing a lot more content, particularly on this blog. Some of our most popular posts include our guides on how to create a Series A data room and a Series A deck, as well as our Ask a Seed VC advice columns.)

All of our new hires are based in New York City, and we’re even opening a new 4,400 square foot office in the city’s SoHo neighborhood.

Of course, just as we’ve celebrated some big successes, there have been big challenges, too. So we’d like to close out 2021 by thanking all the family, friends, and colleagues who’ve supported us when we weren’t #crushingit. And above all, thank you to our founders, who’ve shown tremendous grit and tenacity through the year’s ups and down. We wish everyone a restful and rewarding holiday season, and we’ll see you all in 2022!

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