Valar Ventures is a US-based

venture capital 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 ha ...

fund founded by Andrew McCormack, James Fitzgerald and

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Fac ...

. Historically, the majority of the firm's investments have been in technology startups based outside of Silicon Valley, including in Europe, the UK, the US and Canada. Valar Ventures originally spun out of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel's global parent company based in San Francisco, and is now headquartered near

Madison Square Madison Square is a public square formed by the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at 23rd Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The square was named for Founding Father James Madison, fourth President of the United States. ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

. The firm's namesake is the Valar of

J. R. R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, ; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philology, philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was ...

legendarium Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his ''The Lord of the Rings'', and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of ''The Silmarill ...

, who are god-like immortal spirits that chose to enter the mortal world to prepare it for their living creations. Andrew McCormack and James Fitzgerald are the managing partners of the firm.

Investments

Valar was notably the first venture fund to invest in Xero. The fund made its initial investment in Xero in October 2010 at a valuation of approximately $98 million. Since then, the firm has spearheaded successive rounds of investment in the company and Xero's

market cap Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders. Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by t ...

has grown to more than $4 billion as of February 2014. Valar also led

TransferWise Wise (formerly TransferWise) is a London-based financial technology company founded by Estonian businessmen Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus in January 2011. History Wise was founded by Taavet Hinrikus (Skype's first employee) and fi ...

's Series A and Series B financing rounds in January 2013 and April 2014, respectively. Following Valar's investment,

Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Andreessen ...

led TransferWise's Series C and Baillie Gifford led the company's Series D in 2016 at a $1.1 billion valuation. Both Xero and TransferWise were investments out of Valar's $100M first fund, which was a series of special purpose vehicles, including a $32 million

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

specific fund. Additional investments in startips include: Breather,

N26 N26 (known as ''Number 26'' until July 2016) is a German neobank headquartered in Berlin, Germany. N26 was founded in 2013 in a Rocket Internet Incubator and currently operates in various member states of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). I ...

(€10 million in a 2016 series A round), Descomplica, Dinda, Even, EyeEm, Granify, Homie, Lystable, Oppa, fintech Stash, TradeIt, and Vend. In 2018, Valar led Series A funding for Petal, a

fintech Fintech, a portmanteau of "financial technology", refers to firms using new technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data are r ...

start up and led a second round of funding for Coya, a German insurance startup. In February 2019, Valar Ventures led a $28 million Series B funding round fo
Cluno
a mobility and fintech company based in Germany.

Acton Capital Partners Acton Capital (Acton Capital Partners) is an international venture capital fund, founded in Munich (Germany) and investing in tech-enabled startup companies in Europe and North America. History As one of the first venture capital funds in Europ ...

and Atlantic Labs, which both backed th
company’s Series A
round, also participated. Cluno is a digital car subscription provider that offers fixed monthly package pricing.

References

External links

* {{PayPal Mafia Financial services companies established in 2012 Venture capital firms of the United States