Fantastic undertakings closed two funds with a total value of $220 million, which the seed-stage company shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
Based in New York Eniak raised $60 million for Select 1, the company’s vehicle for further investments in later-stage portfolio corporations, and $160 million for Eniac VI. The company made 11 investments with Select 1, which actually closed in 2021 but has not been publicly announced to this point. According to co-founder and general partner Nihal Mehta, the company plans to make the first investment from its sixth fund “soon.” I plan to do it roughly 40 investments under each funds.
When making recent investments, Eniac’s average check size is $1.5 million. Follow-up checks are likely to be larger, Mehta said, and the largest check invested from the Select Fund is $6 million.
Eniac is an industry agnostic company, and Mehta describes the team as “pre-market fit generalists.” Despite being industry agnostic, even Eniac has been bitten by the AI bug, with Mehta noting that “machine learning and artificial intelligence have been a dominant theme” of the company over the past decade.
“There is some hype around artificial intelligence, but we think it is the most revolutionary wave of computing we have seen since the advent of the Internet,” he said.
Portfolio corporations include 1up Health, Alloy, Anchor, Attentive, Brightwheel, Embrace, Ghost, Hinge, Hive, Level.ai, Maestro, Owlet and Vungle. Eniac was also an early investor in Airbnb and has seen exits from corporations akin to TapCommerce (to Twitter), Anchor (to Spotify), Dubsmash (to Reddit), Hinge (to IAC), Workflow (to Apple), Vungle (to Blackstone), and Vence (to Merck Animal Health).
Mehta declined to call specific LPs, noting only that they are a mixture of “top foundations, endowments, pensions and funds of funds” and that the majority of them are “mission-minded.”
Despite difficult fundraising conditions, Mehta stated that “ironically, this was the fastest fundraising Eniac has done in 15 years.”
“We attribute this success to the ability to refund many funds over the last few years,” he told TechCrunch, although he declined to offer specific refund numbers.
Over the years, the size of Eniac’s funds has increased significantly. In 2010, Eniac raised its inaugural fund of $1.5 million, in 2017 it raised $100 million for its fourth fund and subsequent $125 million for Eniac Fund V in 2021. Over the years, he has supported over 250 startups.