Who are VC's top fund families?
Plus: Content Partners dives into private credit, and an H1 checkup for healthcare funds
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Venture capital funds in 2023—at least in their limited partners' estimation—hinted that they might be able to get back to making money. Or at least stop losing it.
VC funds recorded an aggregate return of 0.4% in the fourth quarter of 2023, but over a longer horizon, select managers have shown an ability to book far better results.
PitchBook's annual ranking of the top fund families in venture capital places familiar firms like Union Square Ventures alongside lesser-known managers that have handily beaten the benchmark, PitchBook's Michael Bodley writes.
Revel Partners swiped the No. 1 spot with the investment manager's Revel Venture Partners fund family. Under its 2021 vintage, Revel Venture Partners has deployed its capital almost exclusively to tech startups.
Revel Venture's cash-cow exits include The Trade Desk, which the firm first backed in a $1.5 million Series A in 2012. The company is now publicly traded on the Nasdaq, with a market cap of about $51 billion.
Other exits include Lockstep, which offers a B2B platform for accounting departments and shipping logistics specialist SupplyAI.
Which other fund families made the list?
An entertainment investor forges into private credit
Content Partners, a Carlyle Group-backed PE firm that specializes in acquiring entertainment IP, is forging a new private credit strategy that originates loans to the content development industry, reports PitchBook's Madeline Shi.
"We see a billion-dollar-plus marketplace that is just unloved and not tapped at this moment," said Alphonse Lordo, an entertainment banker who recently joined Content Partners.
Checking up on 2024's healthcare funds
Our latest Healthcare Funds Report offers a glimpse into the performance of 481 healthcare and life sciences specialist managers—across PE and VC—in the first half of 2024.
PE and VC's fortunes are starting to diverge materially: PE healthcare specialists are outraising the broader asset class, with bigger fundraises and more frequent above-target closes, while VC healthcare and life sciences fundraising declined as a proportion of overall VC fundraising. Meanwhile, as PE healthcare investing grows increasingly competitive and complex, firms are becoming more operationally and thematically sophisticated.
As allocators continue to reevaluate their alternatives allocations, PitchBook lead healthcare analyst Rebecca Springer breaks down capital formation within the sector.