CVCA has launched a new Quarterly Exclusive article series and this quarter Yaletown is in the spotlight.

Excerpt from CVCA Quarterly Exclusive December 2017 – When Yaletown Partners was founded in 2001, it was to fill a gap its founders saw in the pre-revenue and pre-product market in British Columbia. Within two years, Vancouver-based Yaletown had launched a $30M fund, becoming one of the few managers of its kind in the country to successfully finance in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble.

Then, in 2009, on the heels of another market meltdown — the much broader global financial crisis — Yaletown unveiled a second, $100M fund to support promising startups with revenues of between $5M-$8M. That second fund has produced some high-profile exits, including artificial intelligence  machine learning technology company, BitStew Systems, which was bought by General Electric for $205M in late 2016.

Yaletown, which made 7x its initial capital on the BitStew and was awarded the CVCA’s 2017 Venture Capital Deal of the Year Award for the transaction, hasn’t rested on its laurels. So far in 2017, the company has made three significant investments in Canadian-based software and database management companies — PHEMI Systems Corp., Passportal and Tasktop Technologies Inc. — and recently closed its third fund. Details about the new, multi-million dollar Yaletown Innovation Growth Fund are expected to be announced in the coming weeks, but it includes predominantly Canadian institutional investors, including a large pension fund, as well as one foreign investor, so far.

Read more

Author: CVCA – Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association