Investing in the future of enterprise software, entrepreneurs

This morning Cervin Ventures announced the close of $162 million of new capital for us to invest in enterprise startups. In addition, we’re excited to announce the launch of our portfolio services team, led by Silicon Valley veteran Scott Brown, to help our entrepreneurs accelerate the growth of their businesses.

This rounds out what have been exciting years for Cervin, as we have:

-Added Daniel Karp to our investment team

-Completed 10+ investments in companies including Bolster, Causely, FireCompass, Lightlytics, OwnID, Ratio, and Vendelux

- Grown our Assets Under Management (AUM) to more than $335 million

Since we started investing ten years ago, we have believed our team’s experience as operators and entrepreneurs gave us a unique perspective to help entrepreneurs navigate the early days of their journey. Closing our 5th flagship fund in a challenging market demonstrates that LPs recognize how our disciplined approach allows portfolio companies to build sustainable long-term value.

Cervin’s approach to investing is to partner with disciplined entrepreneurs addressing massive, fast-growing, enterprise markets has proven to be productive and helps avoid short-lived hype cycles. Some of our leading investments that are developing into enduring companies include:

- LaunchDarkly (tools for software development)
- Paystand (open infrastructure for B2B payments)
- ArmorCode (application security operations)
- AiFi (autonomous retail experiences)
- Celona (5G infrastructure for enterprise)
- OwnID (passwordless authentication for websites & apps)
- Causely (observability with orchestration remediation)

The next step in Cervin’s journey is to expand the operations support we provide entrepreneurs. The addition of Scott Brown to the team will allow us to expand the capabilities of our services team. With Scott’s 20+ years of B2B marketing experience at both startups and enterprises such as Google, Facebook, and Cisco, we expect to deliver a platform to help our portfolio companies across go-to-market strategies, business development, and market research.

We continue to stay focused on our mission with no strategy drift since our inception. Despite the fact that the market has experienced significant exuberances in the recent past, we remain dedicated to helping founders of early-stage, enterprise software companies in their quest to build enduring companies. We are looking for entrepreneurs with unique insights on how to disrupt markets and the grit to execute on their vision in a capital efficient manner. All partners at Cervin have significant operating experience as founders/executives and as investors, across category leaders such as Akamai, Fore Systems, Nexient, Alteon, Nutanix, and Aviatrix. We hope to bring our collective experience to our portfolio founders.

We’ve been honored to invest in more than 50 companies over the years, more than 35 of which are still active in our portfolio today.

Cervin's Investments in B2B Enterprise Technology

The VC industry is driven by the power-law and its returns are generally defined by a few companies. While we recognize that, we are not shy in supporting capital-efficient development of businesses that may not have large outcomes, thereby aligning our goals with those of the founders. We are confident that our entrepreneurs would say that we are deeply committed to their success - in every scenario and in good times and bad.

We appreciate the confidence that our LPs have put in us and are excited to start investing the new capital. We will continue our disciplined approach to building a sustainable franchise and to better support our amazing founders.

- The Cervin Team