We are thrilled to announce the launch of our newest fund, Bonfire IV. You can check out coverage by Allie Garfinkle of Fortune here.
This fund is our largest yet, with $245M in commitments from some of the best institutional and individual investors in the business. Our strategy remains unwavering: we focus exclusively on B2B software, we enter only at the seed stage, and we make just ten or so new investments per year.
Including the funds at our predecessor firms, we now manage over $1 billion in assets, we have invested in over 150 companies, we have served on over 80 boards of directors, we have helped navigate companies through over 250 follow-on financings that raised over $4bn in capital, we have supported over 50 exits with an aggregate exit value of over $18 billion, and have seen the companies we support generate in aggregate over $5bn in annual revenue.
Everything we do is to further the mission of being the very best choice for the most talented B2B software founders. That is our north star.
Ours is a low volume, high conviction, high support model at seed. Founders and their teams are our customers and our partners, but most of all they are our peers. We strive to always treat them the way we’d want to be treated.
We are in the midst of a platform shift that presents extraordinary opportunity. Today’s startups can now leverage AI to build sophisticated products remarkably early in their lifecycle that can deliver more value and be adopted more easily than ever before. As a result, early-stage startups are growing much faster than usual, especially when they apply that same AI tooling to their own internal operations. It is truly an exciting time to be building and investing, and we are excited to help co-author with founders the new playbooks to win in this era.
On the flip side, the rate of change and degree of unpredictability across the startup ecosystem are higher than ever. The disruptor can unexpectedly and quickly become the disrupted. And the follow-on financing markets can be exceedingly challenging. This is incredibly difficult for founders to navigate. We believe this plays to our strengths, as we have extensive experience and an enviable track record in both guiding founders through their growth journeys and helping companies raise follow-on rounds. This newest, larger fund also helps us continue to support companies in the portfolio with additional capital longer through their lifecycle.
For Bonfire, “B2B software” means a code-based product and a business buyer. It can be enterprise or SMB, agentic or conventional, pay-as-you-go or annual contract, seat-based or usage-based or transaction-based or outcome-based or whatever. We deliberately employ a broad definition because we continue to believe that the universe of founders will be better than us at identifying the biggest and boldest greenfield opportunities.
Our approach—the “Bonfire Way”—has proven to be a winning formula.
We don’t force the pursuit of unsustainable growth. We don’t just show up at board meetings. We don’t focus solely on our most successful companies while neglecting others. Instead, we show up, we do the work, we do what we say we will, and we aim to help build long-term, sustainable, impactful market leaders with sound fundamentals.
With Fund IV, we are thrilled to apply this deep experience base to assist the next generation of exceptional B2B software founders.
Let’s build together,
Mark, Jim, Brett, Loren, Jennifer, Tyler, Deb, Brian and Dominique
