Seed-stage VC firm MaC Venture Capital is on a mission to invest in today’s visionary tech founders and startups that are creating cultural trends to build a better tomorrow. To support this mission, the majority Black-owned firm has announced that it’s just closed on its $110 million inaugural seed fund.
According to an announcement shared with AfroTech, MaC Venture Capital designed this fund to back seed-stage tech startups across several different business sectors — including fintech, e-commerce and marketplaces, interactive media, connectivity, enterprise SaaS, space and aerospace, logistics, and more — that are leveraging shifts in culture and behavior.
Limited partners for the fund include Foot Locker, Inc., Goldman Sachs, Greenspring Associates, Bank of America, Howard University, MacArthur Foundation, the University of Michigan, State of Michigan Retirement System, and Mitch and Freada Kapor, among many others.
MaC Venture Capital — made up of founding general partners Marlon Nichols, Adrian Fenty, Michael Palank, and Charles D. King — has an overarching goal to build up an extraordinary future that reflects the world around us — this includes uplifting overlooked communities such as women, Black people, people of color, immigrants, and others.
To do that, the firm has established this unique fund to accelerate founders looking to solve problems for the 99% and help them reach their breakthrough moment.
“I don’t think there’s another fund that looks anything like us,” King says in a statement. “We represent a very diverse range of perspectives, skill sets, and networks, bridging Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., and we leverage that to support our founders. And we have the ability to broker mission-critical introductions that can cement a company’s trajectory, whether in technology, business, politics, entertainment, or finance.”
The inaugural fund will not only increase access to capital for these overlooked founders and companies, it will also work to inspire well-needed change across these industries in order for equity and opportunity to go hand-in-hand.
“To solve hard problems, it is essential one understands the industry and culture in which they are building. We look to partner with those founders who are technically savvy and have an “earned secret” from prior professional and personal experience,” the firm shares in a blog post. “Cultural change agents by definition have to be rebel misfit troublemakers. We look for those with little fondness for the status quo. With them we look to build this bold and beautiful future.”
Through this new fund, the firm expects to make 40 investments with an average investment of $1 million per company and/or entrepreneur. To date, MaC Venture Capital has invested in 25 different startups and prior to forming MaC Venture Capital, the four founding partners collectively invested in over 135 companies.
Each of the general partners’ diverse backgrounds — which span across tech, business, government, entertainment, and finance — have allowed the VC firm to support founders in a way that gives them the tools they need to succeed while empowering them to be change-makers.
“Although we are investing at a founder’s earliest stage, with a minimum viable product and early traction, we ground ourselves in seeking big opportunities — companies that have the potential to scale quickly, change an industry, and bring something net-new to society,” managing general partner Fenty shared in a statement. “We look for ambitious founders who want to build billion-dollar category leaders.”
According to managing general partner Nichols, MaC Venture Capital sees this fund as an opportunity to “change the way capital is allocated by investing in more Black and Brown founders,” but also as a means to “power companies that are closing the opportunity gap for large groups of people and create more diversity across a wide range of verticals.”
With an ambitious mission to support diverse founders and their visions, MaC Venture Capital aims for this inaugural fund to be a cultural investment that will participate in those future cultural shifts that define how we progress as a society.
For more information about the new fund, visit the firm’s website.
Editorial Note: This piece has been updated to reflect the final number for the inaugural fund.
