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Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American
venture capital firm Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which hav ...
based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including
Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
, Etsy,
Stripe Stripe, striped, or stripes may refer to: Decorations *Stripe (pattern), a line or band that differs in colour or tone from an adjacent surface *Racing stripe, a vehicle decoration *Service stripe, a decoration of the U.S. military Entertainment ...
,
Coinbase Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work and the company lacks a physical headqua ...
, Zynga,
Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to ...
, Stack Overflow, Meetup,
Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...
,
MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the S ...
, Flurry, and Carta.


History

Union Square Ventures (USV) was founded in 2003 by Fred Wilson (a former partner of Flatiron Partners) and Brad Burnham (a former Executive in Residence with AT&T Ventures). They created USV with the intent of investing in and fostering the development of early-stage companies. Their investments are "mostly U.S.-based Internet and mobile companies considered to be ‘disruptive’". Since its establishment, USV is one of the companies that are regularly included in
Red Herring A red herring is a figurative expression referring to a logical fallacy in which a clue or piece of information is or is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual question. Red herring may also refer to: Animals * Red herring (fi ...
’s lists of top venture capital firms. As of 2016, USV had 7 billion dollar exits, including
Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
in 2013 and
Twilio Twilio () is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using i ...
in 2016. USV's 2004 fund is one of the best-performing venture capital funds in history. In 2011 USV was chosen as the best-performing venture capital firm the United States, based on investment return rate. In 2007, Albert Wenger, the former president of del.icio.us, joined the firm as a managing partner. In 2011,
Betaworks Betaworks is an American startup studio and seed stage venture capital company based in New York City that invests in network-focused, consumer-facing media businesses. Its hybrid investor/builder model has led to both investments in fast-grow ...
co-founder Andy Weissman joined USV. In 2018, Rebecca Kaden, previously a General Partner at Maveron joined USV. In 2019, USV announced two new partners–Gillian Munson, formerly the CFO of XO Group, and Nick Grossman, who had previously worked at USV on special projects such as policy and crypto. In 2021, Samson Mesele, previously a corporate attorney at Wachtell,
Lipton Lipton is a British brand of tea, owned by Ekaterra. Lipton was also a supermarket chain in the United Kingdom, later sold to Argyll Foods, after which the company sold only tea. The company is named after its founder, Sir Thomas Lipton, wh ...
, Rosen & Katz, joined USV as general counsel and partner.


References


External links

* {{Private equity and venture capital Private equity firms of the United States Companies based in New York City Financial services companies established in 2003 Financial services companies of the United States Venture capital firms of the United States 2003 establishments in New York City American companies established in 2003