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SOSV announces the close of its $100M Select Fund, the venture investor’s first growth stage fund
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Ned Desmond
Ned Desmond
June 12, 2021
SOSV portfolio companies (Left to right, top to bottom): Perfect Day (milk protein without animals), Sana Health (digital painkiller), Opentrons (lab robot used for Covid-19 testing), VoltStorage (redox flow energy storage), Upside Foods (cultured meat), MycoWorks (mycelium leather), FormLabs (3d printing), Flow Neuroscience (digital antidepressant).

SOSV announced today the close of the SOSV Select Fund, which reached a$100 million hard cap and marks the early stage venture firm’s first fund designed to invest in series B rounds and later.

“While we spend most of our time working with companies that are just getting started,” said Sean O’Sullivan, managing partner at SOSV, “many of our 3-to-5-year-old startups are hitting the tens-of-millions-in-revenue level that attracts later stage investors. The new Select Fund will help us keep pace with those opportunities in the years ahead.”

Over the next three years, SOSV plans to tap the Select Fund to invest $2 to $5 million in 20 to 30 startups at Series B and beyond. SOSV will invest exclusively in its existing portfolio, almost all of which are firms from SOSV’s startup development programs, including IndieBio, HAX, Chinaccelerator, MOX and dlab.

Last year, SOSV invested in 25 of its portfolio companies’ later stage rounds, a 38% increase over 2019. Overall, SOSV companies raised $1 billion in 2020.

“Seven of SOSV’s ten biggest investment rounds over the last eighteen months were companies in the SOSV Climate Tech 100,” added O’Sullivan, “which is a great showcase for an important thesis at SOSV — our belief that human and planetary health is both essential for humanity and a powerful investment strategy. Three of those ten rounds came from our programs in Asia, where we are seeing exciting growth in line with our cross-border investing thesis. It’s very exciting to help those cross-border teams grow from the two or three founders when they joined our programs to bustling firms with hundreds of staff.”

The limited partners in the new SOSV Select Fund include Credit Suisse, WTT Investment Ltd, Golden Vision Capital and AIFAM, along with family offices across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Alongside the new Select Fund, SOSV will continue to deploy capital from the $277 million SOSV Fund IV, which started in 2019 and invests in companies going through its startup development programs, up to Series A.

About SOSV

SOSV is a venture capital firm headquartered in Princeton, NJ. The firm has more $900 million in assets under management and more than 1,000 portfolio companies. SOSV operates the startup development programs HAX (hard tech), IndieBio (life sciences), Chinaccelerator and MOX (cross-border growth in Asia) and dlab (blockchain). Sean O’Sullivan, a serial entrepreneur and technologist, is the founder of SOSV. The firm has 8 general partners and a 130-person staff across seven locations in the US, Europe and Asia.

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