GFT Ventures Fund I - Progress to Date and Looking Ahead
We’re extremely pleased to report that 2022 turned out to be an incredibly productive year for the Fund! We met, and quite frankly exceeded, even our most aggressive expectations.
We started the Fund with an extremely strong and “early” conviction that modern AI and Data Science techniques would fundamentally transform virtually every business, and every industry, over the coming decades.
Since the Fund’s inception, interest throughout the world in AI has accelerated dramatically. With the frenzy around ChatGPT being just one example, the rest of the VC community is now just starting to see what we saw, and devoted our careers to, years ago.
Not surprisingly, the Fund has now closed on over $120M in committed capital, well in excess of our initial $100M target. If you were thinking about deploying additional capital towards the Fund, now would be an ideal time.
We closed four fantastic startup investments in 2022, bringing our total portfolio count to eight, each one sourced through GFT’s extremely “proprietary” deal flow pipeline.
We feel bullish about the future as well. Specifically, we are delighted by the associated “rationalization” of startup valuations that we are now seeing and experiencing firsthand. This creates an enormous opportunity for a fund such as ours with deep expertise in the most disruptive technology advancements in our generation (i.e. AI).
As a final note, we’d be remiss not to mention the events of the last several days involving the commercial banks serving the technology community. Since we do not consider ourselves to be experts on the banking system, and are not privy to all the facts and circumstances involved, we will avoid speculating on why this all occurred and what were the underlying causes. What we can say is that we highly value our relationships with the financial institutions involved, and hope that the incredible value they bring to our “ecosystem” can be quickly restored (by them, or others who might step in to fill the void). Also, although we are continuing to closely monitor the situation, at this time GFT’s direct financial exposure (including via our portfolio company investments) appears to be extremely minimal. We will continue to update our Limited Partners directly in this regard, and are happy to discuss with you at your convenience.
Best regards,
Jeff Herbst and Jay Eum
Founding Managing Partners, GFT Ventures
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