US-based venture capital firm Work-Bench has raised $47m for its second fund, securing the capital from limited partners that included several corporate backers according to TechCrunch.
IT services firm Wipro, energy management business Schneider Electric and enterprise software producer CA Technologies all contributed to the fund, which was co-anchored by venture capital firm Industry Ventures and an unnamed Chicago-based family office.
The LPs also featured several private investors that backed Work-Bench’s debut fund, which closed at $10m in 2013.
Work-Bench targets early-stage enterprise technology startups based in its home country, and intends to invest in 20 companies through the fund, providing approximately $1.5m for each deal, leading seed 2 rounds and investing in series A rounds.
Jonathan Lehr and Jessica Lin, co-founders and general partners of the fund, said in a join blog post announcing the fundraise: “Our secret sauce is really not so secret: we combine our team’s unique backgrounds in corporate IT with our location in NYC – and the density of Fortune 500 companies here – to understand corporate pain points at scale.
“We then work backwards from pain point to founders to find the most exceptional enterprise startups tackling these problems. Then we play matchmaker.”
Work-Bench Fund II has already made nine investments, in companies including cloud communication platform developer Dialpad, security software provider Scytale, algorithm development community manager Algorithmia and engineering analytics platform Seemle.