Bonfire Ventures, the Santa Monica early-stage venture capital firm that has backed local business-to-business (B2B) software startups like ChowNow and Boulevard, has raised $230 million across two new funds, it announced Tuesday.
Bonfire raised $168 million for its third core fund and $63 million for its second opportunity fund—taking the firm to five total funds raised and more than $1 billion in assets under management, it said in a press release.
dot.LA previously reported that Bonfire was seeking to raise the new funds in January, when the venture firm filed regulatory documents indicating its intention to raise $165 million for its third core fund and $65 million for its second “select fund.”
Co-founders Jim Andelman and Mark Mullen told TechCrunch that Bonfire plans to only invest in 25-to-30 startups across each fund, so that the firm can offer more support to those startups. (Disclosure: Mullen is an investor in dot.LA.)
“We are very much a low-volume, high-conviction, high-support investor,” Andelman told TechCrunch. “We maintain the bandwidth to be responsive to founders and earn the role of first call when they have a question.”
Since launching in 2017, Bonfire has built its portfolio primarily around seed-stage, B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, which make up more than 99% of its investments, according to the firm’s website. Bonfire previously raised $100 million for its second fund in 2020, after raising its $63 million first fund in 2017.