09-14-2020

Our Investment in Bonfire Ventures II

by Lindel Eakman

We are pleased to share Foundry Group’s investment in Bonfire Ventures’ newest fund

Founded in 2017 by Jim Andelman and Mark Mullen, Bonfire is a seed-stage fund that focuses on B2B software companies. Their team places a premium on supporting founders as well as the broader B2B software ecosystem in Southern California.

Jim has been a venture capitalist for nearly two decades. Prior to launching Bonfire, he was co-founder and managing director at Rincon Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm based in southern California. Before Bonfire, Mark was a solo general partner at Double M Partners. Prior to founding Double M, he was an investment banker with RBC Capital Markets, where he focused on M&A and private equity. They were joined by Brett Queener in 2018, who spent 20 years in executive roles at Siebel, Salesforce, and SmartRecruiters, and has been an active angel investor in software startups to enable high risk merchant processing payments. We’ve been lucky to support Bonfire from their earliest days and are happy to see the firm continue building on their initial success with this second fund. 

Jim, Mark, and Brett make a great team and they will continue to invest in the firm with another generation of talent being built around them. We watched them build a compelling portfolio in their first core fund and were happy to support the new fund, which they launched in January of this year. They will maintain a tight focus on leading seed rounds, investing in 25-30 companies over a three year period, with a slightly higher reserve percentage for follow-on’s than in Fund I. The size of Fund II will also allow for slightly larger initial investments, and they have already made seven of them. These include Optimize Health, SKAEL, and Cube Software, plus four others that have not yet been announced. We are excited to have invested alongside Bonfire in Optimize Health’s last round. Bonfire shares our values as investors, and we are thrilled to continue our partnership with them as they bring experience and empathy to founders’ journeys. We look forward to continued overlap in our Protocol, Glue, and Adhesive themes.