Tim Chen calmly became one of the most wanted investors required

Tim Chen, Solo VC at Essence VC, said he closed his fourth fund, which is 41 million dollars, without even an attempt. He told Techcrunch that limited investors were very excited about investment, as they have anticipated. He had no time to generate the surface of the stadium.

It may not seem an increase of 41 million dollars such as this era of billions of dollars in project companies and VCS like Jack Altman (Who Who It just raised its second giant fund, with $ 275 million). But this is the basis for Chen not wanting to take more. It is accompanied by the Chen III Fund 2022 of $ 27 million (which rose from its first fund of $ 5 million and $ 1 million).

Chen did not start a new fundraising activity because, until last month, he was still investing from his third fund, which is now concluded. But the limited partner investors began to whisper with each other after one of his conservative companies from his second tour, Tabular, obtained by Databricks for about $ 2.2 billion in 2024.

“This is basically, largely restored our entire box,” Chen told Techcrunch, as he described it on the map. Suddenly, LPS was heard his name everywhere: on the CAP tables, which were mentioned by the other VCS, the founders quoted from his advice. They wanted to.

This is partly, because Chen, a specialist in emerging companies from developers and infrastructure tools in the early stages, is a part that grows in popularity in the era of artificial intelligence.

Chen cut his teeth as a software engineer, where he got the street balance from his time as one of the first employees in MesosphereStart the one -time cloud cloud infrastructure supported by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft; Then he participated in the establishment of the “AIOPS” company called Hyperpilot and sold it in a chant to acquire Cloudra in 2018.

In 2019, Chen began investing an angel and discovered that he had a talent for that, and supported other technical startups such as JASPER, Flatfile and Motherduck. “I really enjoyed it. The founders have loved me, and they continued to tell all of their friends.”

Looking for a new profession, it was believed that Venture was the case, so he had an interview in many Big Sand Hill Road, just to refuse all of them.

He said, “Nobody wants to use me.” “I am a small engineer and founder. I don’t think this is a typical profile.”

Jake Ziller, a friend of his work in Angelist (is now in his own box) launch not to surrender and talk to him in launching his own box on this platform.

“Tell me, Tim, I think you can go to collect a million dollar box and try it.” I said, “Wow. Chen remembers, and through introductions, Chen LPS landed like Bain Capital.

The famous infrastructure and invested from artificial intelligence Martin Casado of Andrien Horwitz came as LP in subsequent funds. And then Investor for a long time from the Candana Capital fund I invested. After selling Tabular, Kim told him that Cendana had already kept $ 15 million for his fourth box. Chen shocked.

He was also receiving calls from others, some of them are former investors such as Sapphire, Gender Catalyst and new individuals. He said, “I was not collecting donations. I didn’t know how much the crowd was at all. I was like publishing and colleagues.”

When Stepstone pushed him to send LP documents so that they could connect money – and wanted to bring others – he chose to collect his work and do the box immediately. Angellist mainly documented his donations. He settled on a reasonable bump from his last box, moving with caution because he still considers himself a beginner in Venture.

The supporters of the fourth box including names such as Tomasz Tunguz (former RDPoint partner, now from Ventures theory) and Ethan Korswell (formerly Bessimer, now from Chemistry VC).

He is attributed to his increasing reputation in his background as an infrastructure engineer. “There are very few VCS that resemble me,” referring to his deep technical background with software infrastructure.

Although this was not attractive to large companies, it was a blessing for its individual investment. Instead of focusing on the typical VC on repression and sales, Chen helps the first founders to know how to build their products.

For example, invest in a company called Comfyui Which, at the time, was working on the AI’s visual product for the consumer based on an open source deployment model. After investing, Chechen advised the founders to become a developed platform for the models they were doing.

Comfortable-Oracle I just collected a $ 17 million series To compete with large closed source model makers. The blog publicly, thanks Chen for helping them to formulate their strategy.