DN Capital launches $350m fund for post-pandemic recovery

Elbow bump: DN Capital co-founders Nenad Marovac and Steve Schlenker

DN Capital, the venture capital firm whose early stage investments include Shazam, has launched a $350m (£254m) fund for tech founders.

The fifth DN Capital fund will target early stage founders developing tech to boost the global recovery.

Founded in 2000, the VC firm has long record of backing start-up before they become market leaders and now manages $950m across its five funds.

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This year has already seen four of the DN Capital portfolio reach billion dollar-plus valuations.

The VC firm was one of the early backers of Shazam in 2004, which was later bought by Apple in 2018. It also led the Series A round in second-hand car platform Auto1, which floated on the German Stock Exchange earlier this year valued at over $10bn and over 150x DN Capital’s entry price per share. This month saw another portfolio company, MrSpex, debut its IPO, valuing the company at over $1bn.

Current portfolio names include unicorns US money transfer service Remitly, digital staffing company Jobandtalent and online education company GoStudent. All of them recently closed billion-dollar financing rounds.

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Nenad Marovac, founder of DN Capital, said: “We’ve always preferred to let our founders and their incredible numbers talk for us. When we say we only partner with the best, we mean it.

“We spend vast amounts of time with entrepreneurs understanding the market, their team, their product and to get to the heart of what they’re trying to achieve, long before we even talk about money. Then we work together with the entrepreneurs as partners to help them where they need it.

DN Capital co-founder and managing partner Steve Schlenker said: “There are tech founders across the globe right now on critical missions to accelerate this recovery and help address the needs, and solve the biggest problems, of the post Covid-19 world.”

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