Formation 8, a venture capital (VC) firm co-founded by two previous corporate venturing executives has raised $448m in its debut fund.
Sources close to the firm said Asian corporations made up part of Formation 8’s debut fund’s limited partners as strategic investors. The VC firm is aiming to invest in US-based entrepreneurs and help them expand into Asia.
The relationship of the three co-founders of Formation 8, Brian Bonwoong Koo, Jim Kim and Joe Lonsdale, are designed to help these strategic partnerships.
Koo, who founded the InnovationHub for his family-owned conglomerate, LS Group in Korea, has also been a co-founder of venture investment firm Harbor Pacific Capital, which was set up by Stanford University alumni to link deals from the US to Korea and more broadly across Asia, and served as its managing partner until 2011.
LS Group was spun off in 2003 from electronics conglomerate LG Group, which was founded by the Koo family and which has a corporate venturing unit run by a different Brian Koo, according to an email from the latter.
Kim founded the energy technology venture unit for industrial conglomerate General Electric, where he invested in A123Systems, China High Speed Transmission and Ocean Power Delivery, and was a partner at venture capital firms CMEA Capital and Khosla Ventures.
Lonsdale was founder of angel investor Peter Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium Capital and remains chief executive of security software provider Palantir that was seed invested by the US government’s intelligence agencies’ quasi-corporate venturing unit In-Q-Tel.
Formation 8 is already an investor in Relate IQ, AkaStudy, Blend Labs, ContextLogic, Delphi, Foro Energy, Hyperdyadic, LearnSprout, Revinate and Backplane.