(Bloomberg) — Felicis Ventures and Morgan Stanley alumni Wesley Chan and Pegah Ebrahimi have raised $450 million for a debut fund that launches their venture capital firm FPV, defying the sour mood among private technology investors.
The pair will be investing across all stages, with an emphasis on early stage deals, where they have experience.
Chan, who recently left venture capital firm Felicis and previously worked at Alphabet Inc.’s venture arm GV, made early bets on Flexport Inc., Robinhood Markets Inc., Plaid Inc. and Gusto.
Ebrahimi, a longtime employee of Morgan Stanley’s investment bank and more recently at Cisco Systems Inc., has advised or invested in startups such as Canva Inc., Snyk Ltd., DataRobot Inc.
and Guild Education.
FPV will be looking in a range of categories across consumer, enterprise and health care. The name stands for Founder’s Point-of-View, to reflect its entrepreneur-friendly approach.
The pair first met as undergraduates in the dorms at Massachusetts Institute of Technology more than 20 years ago.
They’ve collaborated on deals including both being involved in Google’s initial public offering, when Chan was at the tech giant and Ebrahimi was at Morgan Stanley.
Chan has been speaking publicly about the impending correction in the venture capital industry for months, but decided to go out on his own anyway to raise a fund.
He said now can be a good time for better companies to stand out. In a downturn, “the winners become very obvious,” he said.
The investor also recently recovered from cancer, which got him thinking about the next phase in his life.
“Now that you’ve gone through it, it gives you much more of a mission and much more empathy to really truly understand what patients have to go through,” Chan said about investing in health-care.
In an industry that is often criticized for lacking diversity, the two are proud to launch a firm that represents a mix of genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations.
Chan, who is openly gay, said that being from a non-traditional background has helped him keep an open mind about founders who don’t fit the traditional mold. He added that he invested early in overlooked female founders at Canva and Guild, which are now both worth billions.
Ebrahimi pointed to her experience in banking, where “you get really attuned to recognizing great founders.” The former chief operating officer of Morgan Stanley global technology banking said that working with companies from the early stage through the exit gives a sense of the life cycle of successful startups.
A first-time fund gathering $450 million would be considered large in any environment, never mind in a technology downturn.
Tom Lenehan, chief investment officer for philanthropic organization The Wallace Foundation, previously backed Chan through Felicis.
Lenehan said generally he’s reluctant to invest in new funds right now because “we may not have found the bottom” for valuations.
However, he said that FPV’s founders have such a good track record that, even in this market, “they could have taken more money and they didn’t.”
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