In our new article series, we introduce the most exciting venture capital firms that are open for LP investments to our family office network. The article belongs to our exclusive single family office guidebook, where we give guidance on the most relevant topics for newly established and already existing family investment vehicles.
In this article, we talked to Storm Ventures, a Menlo Park-based venture capital fund. We decided to get in touch with Storm Ventures due to their successful early-stage investments in Marketo or site search tool Algolia. We talked to Storm’s Managing Director Ryan Floyd.
Familyofficehub.io (FO): Briefly describe your focus: in which kind of startups are you investing, where is your geographical focus, what’s your average ticket size?
Storm Ventures: We invest in B2B SaaS companies worldwide that have found product-market fit typically around 500K in ARR and then we help them scale to 100M+. We are experts at helping companies scale their go to market strategy as all B2B companies use similar GTM tools and techniques. We are investing out of Fund IV and have over 20 years of helping companies scale with this strategy.
FO: What are exciting companies in your portfolio?
Storm Ventures: We were the early investors in Marketo which was one of the first marketing automation SaaS companies which we ultimately helped to take public and eventually sold to Adobe. We are the early investors in Mobile Iron which is a public company (MOBL) focused on mobile security. The company recently announced that it would be sold to a private equity firm. We have several other exciting companies in the portfolio that represent substantial gains such as Talkdesk (call center saas), Algolia (search API saas) and Workato (workflow automation) and many more. We were the first or early investor in all of these companies with the same strategy.
FO: Why is investing in startups through Storm Ventures a good choice for family offices?
Storm Ventures: We have many family offices involved with Storm. We have consistently delivered positive returns across all of our funds even in difficult times with a strategy that we continue to improve over time. We have a small diverse investment team that is focused on returns not fees. We intentionally keep our funds <300m to optimize for returns for our LPs. We are also very large personal investors in our funds as we cannot think of many better places for us to personally invest.
FO: One last question, since many family offices from our readership are from Europe: are you also open to investments from European FOs?
Storm Ventures: We are open to family offices from Europe and currently have many European investors.
FO: Thanks for your time!
Headquarter: Menlo Park, United States
Website: https://www.stormventures.com
