Canaan's 12th fund - $800M to build the future

Today, is a big day at Canaan with the unveiling of our 12th fund. As a GP in this $800M fund, I am gratified to be on the leadership team of a venture capital fund with a 30+ year history partnering with extraordinary entrepreneurs who create the future. More about the new fund can be found here.

Courageous people, ideas, and capital can make magic happen. Our role is to enable great teams and build new companies to solve unsolvable problems, change the norms of society, and dramatically improve people’s lives. The financial returns follow from the intrinsic value created by these defining organizations. Canaan’s focus, portfolio, and team intentionally evolves with every fund driven by technological advances and societal changes. I want to highlight what makes us excited and where you will see us deploy capital from CXII.

Canaan backs new business models and takes executive positions when incubating new companies. Hrach Simonian seeded Instacart, which is helping our country and families cope through C-19. We are seeding the next generation of new consumer companies through Canaan Beta with Laura Chau, Byron Ling, Hootan Rashidifard. I incubated and co-founded Day One Biopharmaceuticals with Samuel Blackman to challenging historical assumptions in pharma about #childhoodcancers and to reimagine oncology drug development so we can bring novel medicines to patients of all ages faster. Tim Shannon was the first CEO of Arvinas that defined the degrader field with Craig Crews. Expect to see Colleen Feriod Cuffaro make similar announcements as a founding executive in new biotechs. Brent Ahrens seeded multiple ventures in the UK with Tom McCarthy who we backed at Spinifex. Canaan's team is often the first call at 2 AM with our portfolio when a crisis hits because we have led fundraising, recruited teams, and faced operational issues as well.

Canaan is a leader in high science investments across a range of disciplines. We love complex, regulated, technical products and services. Emerging biology and new modalities in the biotech practice with Arrakis Therapeutics, PACT Pharma, NextCure, IDEAYA Biosciences, Nocion Therapeutics, Greywolf, Stargazer, Vivace, and Tyra will improve human health across rare diseases, oncology, immunology, ophthalmology, and neuro. The frontier tech team with Richard Boyle Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka and Hrach Simonian is deep in advanced robotics and aerospace in frontier tech with Aeva, Inc, Berkshire Grey, Capella, Apex.ai, Astra, and Ready Robotics to unlock new capabilities through machines. Super computers from Quantum Circuits, Inc. from Yale University backed by Brendan Dickinson unlock compute capabilities across all fields. Cutting edge security companies like Dragos, Inc., PerimeterX, and Axis Security backed by Joydeep Bhattacharyya protect businesses and critical infrastructure from attacks. Over 80% of the time we are founding or are the first institutional investors in these ventures.

Canaan is diverse by design because leading inventors, founders, and entrepreneurs are as well. >50% of the healthcare investors at Canaan are women. We have immigrants, women, and people of many ethnicities and nationalities on our team across all disciplines because it is the smart thing to do financially. I am particularly proud of our exceptional women led companies such as, but not limited to, Vineti,TheRealReal, ManiMe, Instrumental, Antiva Biosciences, Genome Medical, Hyalex Orthopaedics, Nina Kjellson walks the walk as the host of our #jpmorgan women in venture dinner and WoVen podcasts to amplify the voices of female leaders, Maha Ibrahim as a founding investor of #AllRaise, and Wende Hutton has been a pioneer for women VCs for over 20 years.

Partnering with entrepreneurs, scientific inventors, portfolio companies, advisors, co-investors, and limited partners is a privilege. Thank you.