Five years & $700MM of new capital
2024 marks Acrew Capital’s fifth anniversary. This milestone provides an opportunity for us to reflect on the past and plan for the future.
In tandem with this reflection, we are pleased to announce that we have raised over $700MM of new capital across our family of funds to continue supporting world-class founders in our three key sectors: Data and Security, Fintech, and Health. Acrew invests $1–15MM to lead rounds for Seed and Series A companies out of its early stage program and invests $10–20MM into rounds for Series B and Series C companies out of its inflection stage program.
When we started Acrew in 2019, we pursued a fresh take on building a venture firm. We aim to be the preferred partner to founders and their companies in our sectors and we also care about how we go about doing that. We aspire for founders to describe our team as: authentic, empathetic, and long-term oriented.
At the beginning, the five of us founding partners (and several of our key Acrew team members) reaffirmed our desire to work together. We spent weeks outlining our values, vision, and strategy. In 2019, our LPs put us in business with our first $258MM fund. Now, with our new capital, the firm manages over $1.7B in assets on behalf of our investors, which include several pensions and foundations that find strong alignment with our values and seek a continuation of top tier returns.
There are three things that we’ve been reflecting on. Firstly, we have an awareness of how lucky we are to work with fantastic founders and their teams. Secondly, the firm has sharpened its focus through its continued commitment to evolution. Lastly, we’ve grown our team and feel privileged to work with our amazing crew.
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The founders we partner with are good people. And they are tough, unyielding at times, and fair. Our founders will either have come to a valuable, earned insight through direct experience in an industry or through deep curiosity for the sector they are pursuing. Most importantly, we believe that the founders with whom we partner seek a trusting relationship with our crew. We hold that trust with the utmost respect.
We want to highlight three sets of founder relationships, among the many we are privileged to earn:
Chris and Ryan, founders of Chime, set their sights on providing a better banking solution for every-day Americans. From Chris’ personal experience growing up, and then his professional experience at Green Dot, he’d seen how the large banks in the United States ignored the needs of millions of Americans. Our team leaned in to support their vision by leading their Series A-2. Acrew has since invested several times in the company. Chime announced earlier this year they had $1.5B of annualized revenues and powered spending for 7MM customers, who spent $8B per month on their Chime cards. When we reflect on the journey thus far, which is far from over, we admire Chris, Ryan, and team’s singular focus on serving their customers with simplicity.
Our relationship with Shlomo Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Cato Networks, goes back 20 years. We had met and backed him when he was running Imperva, a company he eventually took public. Fast forward to 2015, and our team co-led the Series A of Shlomo’s latest company, Cato Networks. We’ve since invested several more times in Cato, including out of our Acrew inflection stage program. Having been involved with many notable cybersecurity and data companies over the years, Shlomo set out to create a new category by building the world’s first Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform, which converges software defined networks and network security into a global, cloud-native architecture.
Shlomo, in turn, introduced us to At-Bay, an insurance and security platform that tackles cyber risk for small to medium sized businesses. We led one of the company’s early stage rounds. When we met At-Bay founders Rotem and Roman, we were struck by their combination of domain knowledge and ambition. On the one hand, the company continues to innovate on its offering and product suite. On the other hand, the company held a high bar in terms of managing not only their clients’ risk, but also their own risk (e.g., loss ratios). To grow rapidly while maintaining best in class risk management demonstrates the team’s competency and discipline. At the time of our investment, cyber insurance was viewed as a challenging category. In spite of that challenge, or maybe because of it, At-Bay has had a meaningful impact on the industry.
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Our sector focus has evolved over time. When we started the firm, we had five areas of focus, with each of our partners expressing a “major” and a “minor”. Today, in 2024, Acrew operates as one firm that houses specialist practices in our three sector areas of Data & Security, Fintech, and Health. 90% of what we do fits squarely into one of those three areas.
With that said, many of our investments end up sitting at the venn diagram of two of our areas or, even, all three. Acrew provides the depth of a specialist firm in each sector, while also providing the benefits of cross-sector insights, given the firm’s commitment to operating as one team.
Take for instance our newest sector focus: Health. Our thesis within health is primarily focused on three broad areas: (1) the intersection of health & data, including tooling to better manage and manipulate that data, (2) improving the personalization of care, and (3) lowering the administrative burden in healthcare, while enabling stakeholders to adjust to big business model shifts. Our health founders very much appreciate the cyber security expertise the firm brings to bear as well (as do our fintech founders). Conversely, our data & cyber founders are very interested in opportunities to sell into financial services and healthcare.
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Internally, we believe in operating like one team. Founders benefit from this because they get access to all of our investors, not just the ones they work with day to day. We strive to ensure that everyone’s voice is heard at the firm and that each member of our crew feels like an owner (because each team member is an owner). We align our compensation and recognition to reinforce the emphasis on team and the idea that every investment we make is an investment from Acrew, not just an individual partner. We’ll have more to announce in the coming months in terms of new and refined initiatives from our team that will continue to support our founders.
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In the scheme of things, five years isn’t that long. But with each day that passes, we continue to march towards our shared goal of building a leading venture capital firm. We intend to do it our way and we hope that you now have a better sense of what that way is.
To the next five years and beyond.
Theresia, Lauren, Vishal, Asad, Mark, and the Acrew Team
