Artisanal Ventures Closes B2B Cloud Startup Fund at $62M

Venture capital firm Artisanal Ventures, which works with high-growth business-to-business (B2B) cloud startups, on Thursday (Feb. 3) closed its oversubscribed inaugural fund, Artisanal Ventures I, LP, at $62 million, according to a company announcement.

Investors in the fund include more than 50 founders and senior executives from companies including Square, Atlassian, CrowdStrike, AppDynamics, Snowflake, Splunk, UiPath, MuleSoft and others.

“I’ve been investing in founders and helping them build great companies for decades. Raising a proper fund was the obvious next step,” Andy Price, founding general partner of Artisanal Ventures, said in the announcement.

“Recently, we recognized a huge shift in the VC market,” he said. “Founders can go one of two ways: a high value syndicate where investors dig in and work on their behalf in areas like recruiting and sales, or they go for the highest price, letting hedge funds bid up their companies to inflated valuations. We think the market is pivoting strongly in our direction and back to our partner firms, who are top-tier traditional VC players.”

Artisanal Ventures typically invests between $500,000 and $3.5 million in companies that are considered “high-growth opportunities,” then helps them to unlock their potential as leaders in their industries through relying on its network of partners and ability to help the founders make new connections.

“We are thinking big, but starting small,” said Co-founder and partner Andrew Van Nest. “While we are ambitious and believe our strategy could successfully deploy at least a billion dollars, we want to prove this model can outperform.”

Related: Connected Capital $176M Funding Focused on European B2B SaaS Startups

Earlier this week, Amsterdam-based B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) investment firm Connected Capital closed its oversubscribed Fund II at 154 million euros ($176 million), bringing its total committed capital to more than 200 million euros ($228.5 million).

The company has closed nine platform investments in Europe since being founded in 2017.