Venture Capital Funding May Have Slowed, But Venture Capital Firms Have No Problem Raising New Funds

As ​​the market slumps, venture capital firms continue to announce new funds.

TechCrunch reporters covered five of them in more depth on Tuesday, as you'll see below.

During this time, I corresponded with three companies about their funds and concerns the sponsors had raised during the fundraising phase.

Haris Khurshid, General Partner of Chalo Ventures, has launched a second $50 million fund focused on investing in Pakistani startups and a smaller percentage in Latin American startups.

“With a large population, Pakistan is geographically smaller, well-connected with fewer provinces, has lower regulatory barriers and does not have strong incumbents,” Khurshid, who is from Pakistan, said via email. mail. “It allows Pakistani startups to scale faster across the country and expand into other markets.”

The company started raising funds two months ago and has already secured $35 million in commitments and cash. Khurshid said he expects to close by the end of the second quarter and start investing in the third quarter.

Khurshid explained that the fundraising environment “wasn’t as difficult as we thought,” and what helped him was that specific goal of investing in Pakistan. He said the LPs wanted to know how the company would handle investments in this market, which required the company to explain a bit about why Pakistan needed a targeted fund.

Lorena Suarez, one of the Managing Partners of Argentina-based Alaya Capital, a 10-year-old early-stage venture capital firm, invests in impact startups in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Last month, Alaya achieved the first close of $80 million in capital commitments for its third fund.

As for the behavior of LPs, Suarez said via email that LPs question whether the business fundamentals in Latin America are strong. As a result, “the due diligence takes additional time but has not yet impacted their final commitments. We were concerned about the depth of this financial crisis and the duration of the conflict in Europe with the impact it could have in the years to come."

However, she went on to say that Alaya has seen other LPs be more active in investing “because it is known that vintages during crises perform better than at any other time”.< /p>

At Golden Section, a Houston-based founding studio and venture capital firm, the company closed the first closing of its second fund in May, but did not disclose the amount. Marketing director Yosef Levenstein said via email that the fund will eventually be around $80 million. It is focused on early-stage B2B SaaS, so LP's concerns were about the performance of B2B software in an inflationary environment, he wrote.

It's been a busy day for new funds. Check out some of my colleagues:

Jacquelyn Melinek reported on Multicoin Capital's new $430 million fund for crypto-related investments. She has also written about Protagonist's $100 million fund, which is also crypto-focused. Rebecca Szkutak covered Conscience VC, interviewing Ariana Thacker about her company investing in consumer companies with a scientific edge. Catherine Shu reported on C2 Ventures' second $20 million fund targeting startups disrupting legacy industries. Manish Singh introduced Lightspeed Venture Partners' new India and Southeast Asia fund, which has commitments of $500 million. This fund is part of a group of four across the startup lifecycle that Lightspeed announced on Tuesday for a total of $7 billion. Paul Sawers covered Cathay Innovation's third fund, with $1.05 billion in capital commitments.

Here is a summary of some other content in my inbox:

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