You may not know NFX as a household name, but it’s a prominent venture capital firm that funds fast-growing real estate startups and is where Trulia founder Pete Flint works as managing partner. Now NFX is announcing that it has more cash to dole out to startups: $275 million, to be exact.
The San Francisco-based firm said in a blog post that it had raised a new round of funding that would be used to double down “on seed investing [early stage funding to get a company off the ground], because we think seed is the most important stage.”
NFX splits its investments equally between business-to-business companies and business-to-consumer companies, but said that out of 3,000 firms seeking money this year it will ultimately only fund 0.5 percent.
The new cash, dubbed NFX Fund II, comes after the company initially raised $150 million in 2017. Since then, NFX has led or co-led investments in 25 companies including Radius (an agent social and referral network), Setter, Lyric, Zeus, Ribbon (turns mortgage borrowers into all-cash offers), Outdoorsy and Firefly. The average size of these investments was about $2 million.
Pete Flint
Flint added in an email to Inman that NFX has backed companies working with financial technology, computational biology, real estate tech, gaming and more. According to NFX’s website, the firm’s real estate investments include backing for LiquidSpace, a co-working startup.
Flint, who today is a managing partner at NFX, founded real estate website Trulia in 2004. He served as the Trulia’s CEO until 2015, when Zillow acquired the company, then joined NFX several months later.
In its blog post on Tuesday, NFX said that “we are experts on network effects, growth, and product development.” The firm specifically focuses on companies in the Bay Area and in Israel.
NFX offered few concrete details about future plans. However, it did say in the blog post that the “the tech community has lost its way” and offered sweeping descriptions of “great founders” who have a compulsive, “hard-wired instinct to challenge the way things are.”
“These people typically didn’t fit in where they were born,” the post continues. “They say new things, push barriers, and even make people around them uncomfortable. That’s why they are drawn to the entrepreneurial tech community. We have to continue to invite these kinds of people in. We have to embrace them. They were drawn here for that reason.”
The post adds that this mindset is “the soul of Silicon Valley” before going on to situate NFX’s work in a long progression of history-changing moments that includes the Reformation and the Renaissance.
