Akkadian Ventures

Akkadian Ventures is a venture capital firm specializing in direct and secondary direct investments. The firm does not invest in venture capital funds. Within direct investments, it seeks to invest in mid and late venture stages and secondary direct investments in start-ups. The firm provides early liquidity to founders, early employees, former employees, services providers, angel investors, and early investors.

History

Akkadian Ventures, LLC was founded in 2010 by Benjamin Black and Peter T. Smith, and is based in San Francisco, California. It has additional offices in Denver, Colorado and Las Vegas, Nevada.

Akkadian Ventures operates as a private equity firm. The company invests in growth stage technology companies, as well as provides alternative liquidity solutions for entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capital funds, and employees. Akkadian conducts business in the United States. Akkadian has also developed a proprietary, data-driven methodology to identify which private technology companies are entering hyper-growth and uses this data to “pre-approve” companies for its liquidity programs.

Investments

Akkadian Ventures has made 17 investments. On Feb 20, 2018 they invested $36.5M in Dynamic Signal. Akkadian Ventures has had 9 exits. Notable exits include DocuSign, RingCentral, and Apptio. The company has raised a total of $236.8M across 4 funds, one of them being Akkadian Ventures IV, L.P. This fund was announced on May 18, 2017, and raised a total of $128.8M. Akkadian garnered over $118M for fourth fund investments.

Investment strategy

• Purchase preferred and common stock.

• Design, manage and fund liquidity programs.

• Invest in Special Situations .

• Provide option to exercise liquidity for executives.
• Consolidate shareholder base for pre-IPO(Initial public offering) companies.

• Offer share escrow arrangements .
• Target Companies: typically $20M+ in revenue
• Typical Investment size: $250K - $10 Million
• Investors: Leading Institutional Investors, Family Offices, Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs
• Primary sectors of investment: Software, Internet, Mobile

The firm only invests in private securities held by entrepreneurs and only purchases common and preferred stock from the existing stockholders of privately held companies.

It is sector-agnostic and seeks to invest in online advertising, clean technology, consumer electronics and devices, consumer web, e-commerce, enterprise, games, video, and entertainment, internet, mobile and wireless, network and hosting, communications, SaaS and software, technology-enabled business services.

Akkadian Ventures manages limited partnerships focused exclusively on acquiring small stakes ($250K - $10M) in growing private businesses. The firm specializes in the use of unique structures that lower risk and lower overall tax burdens for start-up employees. Generally acting as a passive investor, Akkadian Ventures centers on providing liquidity to entrepreneurs, founders, early employees and seed investors.

It seeks to invest between $0.1 million and $10 million in companies with revenue generation of more than $20 million annually. The firm seeks to acquire small stakes. It does not require board seats, board participation, or in some cases, even voting rights. The firm prefers to invest in private transactions.