Chemistry raises $500M for second fund, less than two years after debut
What's the deal? Early-stage venture firm ChemistryDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → is raising $500 million for its second fund, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of June. The oversubscribed fund is mostly committed, with a final close expected shortly, people familiar with the matter said.
Why now? The sophomore fund comes less than two years after co-founders Mark Goldberg, Ethan Kurzweil, and Kristina Shen unveiled Chemistry alongside its $350 million debut fund.
Who's behind it? The three founders are industry veterans. Goldberg was a partner at Index Ventures, Kurzweil a managing partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and Shen most recently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
What's the endgame? The San Francisco-based firm focuses on seed- and Series A-stage software companies. It has backed Nova Intelligence, an agentic AI platform for SAP; Noon, an AI product design startup; and AI notetaking software Granola.
What's the pitch? The founders said they built Chemistry to leverage their experience while aiming to "out-hustle the legacy firms that have grown distracted by scale." They said they had cumulatively led early-stage investments in more than a dozen unicorns, including PagerDuty, Intercom, Persona, Twitch, and Pave.
The signal: Chemistry is one of several firms that experienced venture capitalists have spun up in recent years. A fast, oversubscribed second raise signals that limited partners still back veteran teams betting on early-stage AI software.
Read more: TechCrunch
