Greycroft raises $250M for its fifth early-stage fund

Greycroft, the venture capital firm that’s backed companies like the Huffington Post, Plated and Venmo, is announcing that it has raised $250 million for its latest fund.

The firm was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof, Ian Sigalow and Dana Settle, and it now invests from a fund for seed and Series A deals (this is its fifth early-stage fund) and a separate fund focused on growth investments. Recent bets include scooter startup Bird and podcast network Wondery.

Sigalow told me that for the most part, the firm’s strategy isn’t changing, though it has adapted to what he called “the rise of the institutional seed round” by making more seed investments of its own.

“I think it’s mostly a change in nomenclature,” Sigalow said — where a funding round of a few million dollars would previously have been called a Series A, it’s is now considered seed funding. (And anything before that becomes “pre-seed.”) “There is on the margin more capital being deployed industry-wide now than there was five or 10 years ago. That’s true at every stage. Rounds have gotten slightly larger.”

And while Greycroft has offices in New York and Los Angeles, the firm notes that some of its recent successes have come from Birmingham, Alabama (Shipt, which was acquired by Target) and Chicago (Trunk Club, acquired by Nordstrom, as well as Braintree, acquired by PayPal).

Settle said Greycroft tries to look at “opportunities in all kinds of markets.” Sigalow added that one of the “big unsung advantages” of being in LA and NYC is “true access to virtually direct flights everywhere.”

The firm also says that nearly half of its investments go into startups founded by women and other underrepresented groups — its female-founded startups include BaubleBar, BitPesa, Clique, Cuyana, Eloquii, HopSkipDrive, theRealReal, Thrive Global and theSkimm.

And while many of Greycroft’s best-known investments have been consumer startups, Settle and Sigalow said the firm has always had a pretty even split between business-to-business and business-to-consumer models. It’s just that the consumer startups tend to get more attention from the press.

Sigalow also said that lately, more enterprise and non-consumer startups seem interested in working with Greycroft because of its consumer successes, because they’re looking to incorporate “what was traditionally B2C functionality.”

“I really think there’s an advantage to all these cross-discipline approaches,” he said.

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