Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures is an American New York-based venture capital firm, that manages assets totaling $1 billion as of March 2016. The firm is one of the top returning venture capital funds in the world, its 2004 fund returning 13.91 times cash-on-cash with an IRR of 67.0%.[1][2]
Firm
Union Square Ventures was founded in 2003 by Fred Wilson (a former partner of Flatiron Partners) and Brad Burnham (a former Executor in Residence with AT&T Ventures). The two men 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’”. Additionally, the firm's founder Fred Wilson has a high public profile in the tech world stemming in part to his blog AVC.com.
In 2007, Albert Wenger, the former president of del.icio.us, joined the firm as a partner. In 2011, Betaworks founder Andy Weissman joined USV. In 2018, Rebecca Kaden, previously a General Partner at Maveron joined USV. In 2019, USV announced two new partners joined the firm -- Gillian Munson, formerly the CFO of XO Group, and Nick Grossman, who had previously worked at USV on special projects such as policy and cryptocurrency.
USV is one of a handful of firms that regularly included in Red Herring’s lists of top venture capital firms.
In 2011, USV was deemed as being the best performing VC in the US based on investment return rate.
The firm had billion dollar exits every year from 2011 to 2017 including Zynga 2011 at 7.7B, Indeed 2012 at 1.4B, Tumblr 2013 1.1B, Twitter 2013 at 14.2 B, Lending Club 2014 at 5.42B, Etsy 2015 at 1.78B, Twilio 2016 at 1.23B, and MongoDB 2017 at 1.6B[3][4]
Portfolio
Among USV's notable early-stage investments are:
- Behance
- Boxee
- Casetext
- Clarifai
- Coinbase
- Clue (mobile app)
- CrowdRise
- Del.icio.us
- Disqus
- Dronebase
- DuckDuckGo
- Duolingo
- Etsy
- eShares
- FeedBurner
- Figure 1
- Firebase
- Flurry
- Foursquare
- Funding Circle
- goTenna
- Indeed
- Kickstarter
- Koko
- La Ruche
- Meetup
- MongoDB
- OB1
- Protocol Labs
- Quizlet
- Radionomy
- SimScale
- Shippo
- Work Market
- Yieldmo[5]