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 York IE, a venture capital firm founded by successful angel investors aiming to become part of the project by helping first-hand entrepreneurs to build and scale their projects in a sustainable and profitable manner instead of focusing on profit maximization. Their desire to be more than an investment partner and empower entrepreneurs and put their knowledge and experience at disposal of new tech generations makes this company a very exciting opportunity!
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?
York IE: We believe entrepreneurs are the visionaries, hustlers, and operators and our vision is aligning with the entrepreneurs to reshape the way startups are built, scaled, and monetized since we think the current VC model is not always advantageous to entrepreneurs.
This is why our approach is different, as we believe in responsible fundraising where the founding teams maintain control of their business and their cap table. We are able to be so focused on our entrepreneurs because we run a syndicate model in which we take no management fees.
Our general investment approach is investing in strong industry and/or technology founder(s), preferably serial founder, seeking Go-to-Market (GTM) and Growth help, from a B2B and scalable subscription-based revenue (SaaS) models that have recurring revenue that is also repeatable, worldwide scalable, sustainable, and poised for growth and scale and are operating on tech laggard markets ripe for disruption.
Our average ticket size is US$500k and we plan to double it by the end of 2021.
FO: What are exciting companies in your portfolio – and why?
York IE: We launched our investment firm because we had such a successful track record of success as angel investors. As angels, we invested in more than 60 companies and only had 4 failures. We also saw a lot of strategic exits, with many still vibrant and growing companies, including one successful IPO. Our portfolio companies are being rapidly adopted by customers and gaining significant market interest.
Some of the companies we’re bullish on include:
- MetaData, which was ranked 233 on the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies
- Finmark, which was recently named a top 5 startup of the year
- WEVO, which is the only company that can diagnose and compare multiple pages across a visitor’s digital journey giving companies an unprecedented understanding of their customer experience
- Auditoria, which continues to announce new Intelligent Automation capabilities and partnerships to transform the finance back office
- Datazoom, the first Video Data Platform, that standardized data for video teams as streaming video explodes
- uConnect, Creator of the first all-in-one virtual career center for colleges and universities
- Canvs, holds NLP patents around emotion in conversations driven by a proprietary and unique ontology of language around sentiment analysis
FO: Why should a Family Office invest in York IE as LP?
York IE: We believe our deal flow is better than other firms because of the pre-existing relationships with entrepreneurs, corporate development and venture capital teams, our strong technology and engineering background and networks together with our investment portfolio history, exits, value-add, and track record. Also, we are clearly differentiated due to our specific approach – entrepreneur-first; market intelligence, and data-led, as due to the region (Northeast) and the startup stage we invest in.
Finally, something that proves our different approach is that we work daily with our investments so we’re helping them scale, instead of just waiting for quarterly updates.
The firm is made up of a diverse group of high net worth individuals, family offices, and institutions who want access to a unique asset class and our strong deal flow, which has been cultivated over the past 15 years working in tech. Our investment partners invest alongside our own capital. Since it is an evergreen syndicate model and not a fund, we are always looking for new investors to join.
FO: Are you also open to investments from European family offices?
York IE: Yes. We have a long history of doing business internationally and expect the same for York IE
FO: Thanks for your time!
Headquarters: Manchester, New Hampshire, USA
Website: York IE
