Early-stage enterprise capital agency Big Sky Capital, working in Miami, Kazakhstan and Singapore, at present introduced its Fund I with $20 million in capital commitments.
Based by Jahn Karsybaev and Adil Nurgozhin, who met whereas on the College of Montana — which impressed the agency’s title — after careers in company IT and enterprise capital, respectively. They launched 5 startups collectively, some that failed and one which exited, earlier than beginning Massive Sky Capital.
After exiting their firm, they started angel investing, writing small checks primarily to enterprise SaaS firms to assist construct up their portfolio. Emphasis was additionally on immigrant founders, as they themselves had come to the U.S. from Kazakhstan.
They started fundraising for the fund in late 2021, which turned out to be a studying course of, Karsybaev informed TechCrunch.
“Many of the LPs we spoke to have been C-level know-how executives at giant firms, and we thought that enterprise capital and investing into the fund was frequent data,” he stated. “We found it was not as mainstream as we thought. We needed to reduce and go at it as extra of an academic tour of what the enterprise capital funds and why you need to make investments.”
That ended up including six months to the fundraising timeline. Then the economic system shifted in late 2022, and after attempting to boost into 2023, the pair determined to choose the $20 million already dedicated, Karsybaev stated.
Massive Sky began investing from the fund in February of this 12 months and writes checks between $250,000 and $500,000 for firms of their earliest levels, together with these pre-revenue. It has a portfolio of 12 firms within the areas of cybersecurity, well being know-how and fintech, together with frontline employee software program firm Clockster, title search firm Pippin and personal debt funding firm Swaypay.
“Well being tech is attention-grabbing, particularly whenever you apply a few of that to the very archaic properties of the U.S. healthcare system,” Karsybaev stated. “There’s only a great quantity of alternative to enhance that area, together with using AI for stroke prediction. In the meantime, cybersecurity is the following conflict that’s going to occur.”
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