Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Kickstart Seed Fund Raises $74 Million, Fourth Fund

Salt Lake City-based Kickstart Seed Fund, the seed stage venture capital investment fund led by Gavin Christensen and Dalton Wright, has raised a big new, $74M fourth fund, Kickstart Seed Fund IV (K4). According to Christensen, the new fund was anchored by a number of new, institutional limited partners (LPs), and also included a number of Utah entrepreneurs, including Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight, Jeremy Andrus of Traeger Grills, Ryan Smith of Qualtrics, and others. The fund is a significant increase from Kickstart's last fund, which was worth $39M. According to Christensen, the ability to raise the big new fund is in much part due to the great success the region has seen in producing high quality startups (and exits). As part of the new fund, Kickstart Seed Fund said it has promoted Alex Soffe to Partner, and Curt Roberts to Administrative Partner at the firm. Kickstart got its start in 2008, with a fund worth a mere $8M. The firm's existing portfolio firms include such companies as Cotopaxi, Chatbooks and Stance. Kickstart's primary investments have been in B2B, enterprise software and software-as-a-service startups, although the firm also makes investments in other areas.