"Tim Chen, solo VC at his firm Essence VC, just closed his fourth fund, a fresh $41 million, without even trying. Limited partner investors (LPs) were so eager to invest, they pre-empted it, he told TechCrunch. He hadn't even time to generate a pitch deck. True, $41 million might not sound like much in this age of multi-billion venture firms and solo VCs like Jack Altman (who just raised his second giant fund, at $275 million)."
"Chen hadn't begun new fundraising activity because, until last month, he was still investing out of his third fund, which has now wrapped. But limited partner investors had begun whispering about him amongst themselves after one of his portfolio companies from his second round, Tabular, was acquired by Databricks for about $2.2 billion in 2024. "That basically, pretty much returned our whole fund," Chen told TechCrunch, and put him "on the map," as he described."
Tim Chen is a solo venture capitalist at Essence VC who closed a $41 million fourth fund after limited partners pre-empted the round. He had not been actively fundraising because he was still investing from his third fund, which has now wrapped. A 2024 Databricks acquisition of Tabular for about $2.2 billion largely returned his second fund and raised his profile among LPs and founders. Chen focuses on earliest-stage developer tools and infrastructure startups. Chen previously worked as a software engineer at Mesosphere, co-founded Hyperpilot (acqui-hired by Cloudera in 2018), and began angel investing in 2019, backing Jasper, FlatFile and MotherDuck.
Read at TechCrunch
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