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Although the four-person team behind Susa Ventures has been working together for nearly a year, they just closed their $25 million fund that is officially getting them off the ground.
Their goal is to back 40 to 45 data-focused, early-stage startups in any sector over the next two years.
The partners themselves are data geeks: Eva Ho was a founding exec at LA’s data-centric location platform Factual, Chad Byers was formerly at Integrate.com, Leo Polovets was an early engineer at LinkedIn and Seth Berman is an active seed investor already. The $25 million will serve as a good jumping-off point for the team.
“We wanted to start smaller to prove our hypotheses around data as we are learning to hustle and are getting into the best deals,” Ho said.
Susa has already invested in 20 companies, three of which are in stealth. (The 17 public investments include: Lyst, Declara, Zephyr Health Namo Media, Robinhood, Lendup, Whisper, Vurb, Standard Treasury, Casetext, Periscope, Frontback, Rockbot, Flexport, PipelineDB, Move Loot and Bay Sensors.)
To round out this list, Susa is looking to make $250,000 seed investments in companies that are innovating with data in any industry and that have raised less than $10 million.
“In every sector whether its commerce, finance or education, data has become such a huge part of that narrative,” Ho said. “Data can be very transformative even traditional companies - that are using data smarter.”
