Scale Venture Partners Fund VII closes on $600m

Alessia Argentieri
07 December 2020

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Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Scale Venture Partners has closed its seventh fund on $600m.

The vehicle is larger than its predecessor, Scale Venture Partners Fund VI, which closed on $400m in July 2018.

Scale Fund VII will be managed by partners Stacey Bishop, Rory O'Driscoll, Andy Vitus, Ariel Tseitlin and Alex Niehenke. The firm has recently promoted Jeremy Kaufmann to principal, Sam Baker to vice-president and John Gianakopoulos to senior associate, and has hired Chris Yin from RainforestQA.

Scale is dedicated to investments in cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies based across the US and Europe. Recent public offerings from Scale's portfolio include Bill.com, JFrog and Root Insurance, while recent investments include a $40m series-B round in human resources software company Papaya Global and a $29m series-B round for real estate tech startup Spruce Holdings.

In Europe, Scale has invested in a $60m series-C funding round for Lisbon-based translation software company Unbabel and in a $35m series-C funding round for Matillion, a UK-headquartered developer of cloud-based data software.

Investors
Scale Venture Fund VII received commitments from previous backers and new investors, attracting a wide base of LPs.

Investments
The fund will target software startups with a special focus on cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity and AI.

It will primarily lead and co-lead series-B and -C rounds across Europe and the US.

"Fund VII will build on the focus areas that have driven our success to date: future of work technologies, cloud infrastructure, industry verticals and security," said Andy Vitus, partner at Scale Venture. "We are increasingly interested in how machine intelligence, widespread platform interoperability via APIs, and automated data capture allow a new class of enterprise software that we've come to call cognitive apps. These applications sit on top of today's SaaS platforms to fully automate simple tasks and augment users performing complex tasks. We expect more AI-first companies to make creative use of algorithms, connectivity and real-world data to build capabilities that were not previously possible."

People
Scale Venture Partners – Stacey Bishop, Rory O'Driscoll, Andy Vitus, Ariel Tseitlin, Alex Niehenke (partners).