An unnamed endowment is among the LPs in Engineering Capital's third fund, which is aligned to the innovation pipelines at Stanford, Michigan and Toronto.
US-based venture firm Engineering Capital has closed its third fund with $60m from contributors including an unnamed university endowment, fund-of-funds and three philanthropic foundations, TechCrunch has reported.
Engineering Capital’s team seeks specific software features that could potentially be applied to expand capabilities across a wide variety of applications – an investment hypothesis it terms “technical insights”.
Examples include tools to harmonise access to different public clouds or execute without infringing data protection regulations.
The firm looks to lead seed-stage rounds but typically supplies $1m and $3m per portfolio company in total, aiming to support each toward revenue generation.
Ashmeet Sidana, a Stanford University computer science graduate, founded Engineering Capital in 2015. He continues to scout Stanford’s ecosystem for deals, together with those of University of Michigan and University of Toronto-run incubator Creative Destruction Lab.
Engineering Capital’s exit record includes acquisitions of cloud technology maintenance product companies SignalFx and Netsil for $1bn and up to $74m respectively, the latter being an initial public offering. On both occasions, Engineering Capital was the first investor.
More recent bets include data protection technology business Baffle and data inconsistency checking software developer Robust Intelligence.
Engineering Capital’s second fund raised $47.5m from undisclosed investors in 2017 according to regulatory filing, two years after its precursor had closed with $32m and 25 LPs including fund-of-funds Cendana Capital, according to the Venture Capital Journal.
