Dessy Levinson is Vice President and Head of Story at 645 Ventures, a venture capital firm based in New York.

We are excited to announce 645 Ventures Fund II, a $40 million oversubscribed fund that enables us to continue to support world-class founders and help them scale their startups from the seed stage to growth stage and beyond.

With our new fund, we’re seeking to partner with passionate founders who are building post-launch, software and Internet companies that are targeting large markets ($1 billion or greater). We partner with founders who have a high degree of commitment and domain expertise, who have also put in the sweat equity to take their companies from the concept stage to early product-launch. We are selective, conviction driven investors rather than spray and pray investors. This approach results in a more concentrated portfolio that we support through 645 Ops, our internal value-add practice.

Our approach emphasizes establishing relationships with exceptional teams early in their startup’s history, where we spend time getting to know the founders, market, product, and key milestones. We provide targeted resources to these founders, at times even before investing, as a way of showing value and building mutual conviction. Founders seek to partner with us because our focused, resource-intensive approach helps accelerate the trajectory of their businesses.

Echoing the startups we back, our first project, Fund I,  was our MVP. For four years, we put our heads down and worked day and night to prove that VCs too could be scrappy and startup-minded. We built technology, tested it, incorporated feedback from our customers (our founders and LPs) and iterated tirelessly. As we tell our portfolio and each-other, “hard work works.”

Our new fund focuses on companies with the following characteristics:

  • Sectors: SaaS, infrastructure software, and selective consumer technology companies, such as online marketplaces and direct-to-consumer brands
  • Stage: Primarily post-launch companies that demonstrate early product market fit in terms of rapid customer and user growth. We will invest at both seed and Series A.
  • Revenue Scale: We focus on companies that have the potential to reach $100m+ in revenue over the long term.

Although our firm is young, many of our portfolio companies –– including Fiscalnote, Iterable, MM.LaFleur, and Goldbely –– have grown from seed to growth stage businesses that now demonstrate large revenue scale, reaching or exceeding $50 million in net revenues. We are pleased to partner with these teams as they grow their companies into category leaders. It is our portfolio founders’ success that gives us the conviction that we are charting the right path, and the passion to provide them with our very best.

If you are a founder and would like to get in touch with us, please send an email with an executive summary on your business to [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.