Deep relationships Visionary focus Consistent outperformance
With a core investment team averaging 24 years of early-stage venture capital experience, Spur Capital brings diverse and rich insights to each of its funds-of-funds.
Spur Capital has a successful history of building durable relationships with top-tier venture capital firms in early-stage technology and life science as well as uncovering up-and-coming firms. Limited partners are leading endowments, family offices, foundations, and institutional investors in the United States and Western Europe.
our time-tested approach
Identifying and predicting success
in early-stage venture capital
Academic research has demonstrated the historical persistence of relative outperformance of venture capital investing. Given this documented characteristic and its own investment experience, Spur emphasizes firms with significant prior success. Each Spur fund has carried forward a core group of prior Funds’ most successful relationships; concurrently Spur Capital evaluates potential new relationships that might “average up” the portfolio.
In the search for the next generation of top-tier venture firms, Spur pursues groups with unique talents and operating experience, insights and vision, and the ability to anticipate new and important technology developments and waves. The Spur investment team approaches all opportunities with an open door and open mind, and has historically been early to identify, select, and access managers who have emerged as the new generation of top-quartile venture firms.
Venture capital partnerships that Spur invests with are pursuing, supporting, and capitalizing on big, audacious ideas that are changing the world and how we live in it. These companies are revolutionizing many industries including:
artificial intelligence
bioinformatics
blockchain
consumer
enterprise
life sciences
machine learning
novel therapeutics
why funds-of-funds?
Providing investors with significant
investment and economic benefits
Venture capital funds-of-funds managers have a level of dedicated expertise and a depth and breadth of relationships applied to create diversified portfolios that may not be available to finance professionals with broader mandates and greater time constraints. Key advantages are:
Prior to forming Spur in 2001, the Spur Directors invested through a variety of investment conditions back to the early 1990's and have developed a steady long-term orientation to the venture sector. In addition to the inaugural team, Spur has added two new investment partners. The venture capitalists with which the team has invested knows Spur as a stable, reliable, and value-added limited partner.
Among the team members’ accomplishments are contributions to the advancement and evolution of terms and conditions, performance measurement, and research as well as authorship of several leading books and articles on private equity.
Spur’s success in selecting funds that consistently outperform has been driven by the team’s broad view of the investment universe, the diversity of its experience, longstanding relationships with fund managers, and reputations as thought leaders within early-stage investing.
