VENTURE capital company Patron has raised US$100 million for a new fund that will focus on young consumer-facing companies, with a particular focus on technologies inspired by gaming.
It is the second fund for Patron, which is backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon, Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson, Y Combinator president Garry Tan and SV Angel founder Ron Conway.
Patron is run by Jason Yeh and Brian Cho, former executives at Riot Games, and Amber Atherton, a startup founder who sold her firm to Discord.
Their investing philosophy pulls from their experience in the online gaming industry, and aims to use that knowledge base to identify the next big consumer technology startups.
“For the first time we have this gaming-native generation, who are used to using Roblox and Discord everyday,” Yeh said. “Those products they don’t think about as games, it’s just how they do things online.”
The new fundraising, which took about a year, follows Patron’s first fund of US$90 million, which it invested in 21 companies at the seed stage over a three-year period.
Its next fund aims to do the same: Invest in 20 to 25 companies with cheques of US$1 million to US$4 million over three years. With those investments Patron asks for 10 per cent ownership of a startup, Yeh said.
About 20 per cent of the company’s portfolio are game studios, Patron said, the rest are startups that apply the know-how of gaming companies to other markets such as building artificial intelligence avatars, smart shopping assistants and music streaming platforms.
Companies that can tap into the community-building element of apps like Discord will be the ones that stand out, Atherton said. “Gaming and games can be a force for good and encourage human connection,” she said. BLOOMBERG
