Longtime New York-based seed investor, Contour Venture Partners, is making progress on its latest flagship fund after lowering its target.
The firm closed on $42 million, raised from 64 backers, for Contour Venture Partners Fund V, according to an SEC filing from May 17. The firm is targeting $70 million for its fifth flagship fund and started fundraising in May of last year.
Contour Venture Partners could not be reached for comment.
The firm initially set out to raise $90 million, according to an SEC filing from May 2023. It’s been a tough few years for venture funds looking to raise new vehicles. In the past year, VCs, including DCVC, Tiger Global and Founders Fund, have also lowered their fundraising expectations. Venture fundraising was down more than 50% last year compared to 2022’s record-breaking year, according to PitchBook data.
Contour writes checks between $500,000 and $1.5 million and prefers to lead rounds in seed and early-stage companies. The firm focuses on sectors such as SaaS, digital media and financial services and has a preference for companies based in New York or in the Northeast.
While Contour isn’t equipped with a war chest of capital like some seed firms, it has built a track record of investing in solid companies.
The firm was one of the first checks into cloud analytics platform Datadog in 2011, which went on to IPO in 2019 with a $7.8 billion valuation. Contour backed lending-focused financial platform OnDeck in 2006, which has struggled in recent years but had a notable exit when it went public in 2014 with a $1.3 billion valuation.
Contour’s active portfolio includes product intelligence platform Pendo, which has raised more than $460 million in venture funding and was last valued at $2.6 billion. The company is also an investor in Movable Ink, a data startup that has raised nearly $100 million and was last valued at $1.3 billion.
The nearly 20-year-old firm has raised more than $370 million since its founding in 2005 across four flagship funds and three opportunity funds. The firm is still led by its two founding partners, Matt Gorin and Bob Greene.
