Conductive Ventures raised a $200 million Fund III to continue its focus on investing in founders where other venture capital firms did not see the potential.
Carey Lai and Paul Yeh started the firm in 2017. In 2018 when it officially launched with a $100 million enterprise fund.
Today, Conductive has 24 companies in its portfolio and boasts that over 50% of them are based outside the Bay Area and two-thirds of the founders are immigrants or minorities.
These entrepreneurs were forced to be capital efficient because they didn’t have the networks or access for whatever reason. These turn out to be companies that have “real revenue,” Lai said.
Yeh, who came from Taiwan when he was a child, says a lot of the entrepreneurs they see who are minorities and immigrants “are so scrappy.”