Thursday, March 3, 2016

Brad Feld Backs New Venture Fund

Venture capitalists Brad Feld has put his backing behind a new venture capital firm, which says it is aimed at investing in "overachieving, underrepresented startup founders"--particularly people of color, women, and/or LGBT founders. According to San Francisco's Backstage Capital, Feld joined Marc Andreessen, Susan Kimberlin (Salesforce), Leslie Miley (Twitter), and Lars Rasmussen (Google Maps) as LPs in the fund, which seeks to invest $25k-$100k in pre-seed and seed stage startups. The new fund says it has made six investments so far, and is led by Arlan Hamilton, who the firm sais is one of the first LGBT black women to start their own venture firm. Feld, as well as startup accelerator Techstars, which he co-founded, has backed a number of efforts to increase the diversity in the technology industry.