Cendana Capital

03/18/2025

Our new fund:

Fifteen years ago, we developed the thesis that seed stage venture would become de facto early stage venture, and launched Cendana Capital to partner with these next-gen VC firms. Though our ideas turned out prescient, raising the first fund was quite difficult, and we were told No by almost every prospective LP we pitched. The most common reasons included the illiquid duration of venture (memories of the 2008 GFC were still fresh), being a first-time fund manager, the stacked fees from a fund of funds model, and also the belief that “Seed VC” was a fad. It was painful to be rejected by almost everyone, but we did have a few believers in the institutional LP world, including UTIMCO and Cambridge Associates, and we are forever grateful. From the beginning, we were collaborative with LPs and GPs because we were on a mission and we were in it together — we would show the LP world what very early stage venture was about.

Now, we have what we’ll call LGF: LP/GP Fit. We think this LGF was accelerated in the past few years with the escalation of the platform VC firms who were raising larger and larger families of funds. Institutional LPs with established venture portfolios began to realize that their roster of these multistage firms meant they didn’t have quite the exposure to early-stage venture as they had originally envisioned. As a pure play in very early stage venture, our strategy became complementary to these institutional LPs with established venture portfolios.

Today, we are announcing our new fund, Cendana 6. It was our fastest fundraise ever, and had interest well above our $400M hard cap. We added a handful of new institutional LPs–including for the first time, 2 public pension funds. We are particularly keen that a number of our LPs are mission driven–they are the financial engines for a number of world-class educational and not-for-profit organizations, and of course, public pension funds that provide the retirement benefits to their members. We are grateful for the trust and support of our LPs!

Armed with the pattern recognition built over the past 15 years, and the willingness to be both creative and open to refining our approach, we are super excited about the opportunities over the next few years. Chaos is a ladder–for most people, chaos leads to confusion, inaction and ultimately failure. If we remain clear-eyed about our mission, execute accordingly and become true partners along the way to our LPs and to our GPs, we are confident that we can lead the way.

Fifteen years ago, we developed the thesis that seed stage venture would become de facto early stage venture, and launched Cendana to…

07/10/2024

Not a 20 min podcast 😉 Kelli Fontaine and I did an 1.5 hour podcast with Alex Shahidi, Co-CIO of Evoke Advisors We go in depth on Pre-Seed and Seed VC and our investment approach at Cendana Capital. Outstanding, probing questions from Alex who is a very thoughtful investor 💥

Michael is the Founder of Cendana Capital, a San Francisco-based firm that invests in very early-stage venture capital funds globally. Kelli Fontaine joined ...

06/27/2024

One metric that LPs should consider is the specific impact a single company can have on their own portfolio. One way to assess this is the look-through ownership percentage. Two contrasting examples:

Assume a $45M portfolio fund where the LP makes a $15M commitment (33% of the fund), and that fund is getting 9% initial ownership--that's a 3% look-through ownership for the LP.

Contrast that with a $45M portfolio fund where the LP makes a $4.5M commitment (10% of the fund), and that fund is getting 1% initial ownership ($200K checks at $20M post)--that's 0.1% look-through ownership for the LP.

For this LP, the first approach has 30x greater look-through ownership than the second approach--each positive exit will have a more meaningful impact to the LP's return. This is one of the reasons that from the beginning, we at Cendana Capital have been focused on high conviction investing into portfolio funds that punch above their weight relative to their fund size.

04/11/2024

LPs want liquidity--and now we at Cendana Capital are here to help! Very excited to announce our new secondaries fund, for which we partnered with Kline Hill Partners. Substantially oversubscribed at $105M, the intent is to deploy this capital through the end of this year. The focus will be acquiring LP interests of very early stage VC funds, leveraging our ecosystem of GPs and LPs. We are grateful to all of our LPs who have supported us on our journey, as we continue to seek new ways to innovate and bring value drivers to the Cendana Platform.

Fund-of-funds investor Cendana Capital has joined with Kline Hill Partners for a new oversubscribed fund to buy out stakes from seed LPs looking for liquidity.

09/11/2023

Fundraising is an intrinsic element for most in the venture capital world, the continuous dynamic of providing opportunities to global investors with the conviction that your opportunity provides the solution investors seek.

Given this hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, Cendana Capital is thrilled to announce today that we have raised approximately $470 million in capital to deploy across our global strategies. This comprises $340 million for our US-focused Cendana 5, $67 million for International 2, $30 million for our direct investment program, and an additional $30 million for a managed account. Our assets under management are now over $2 billion.

We are thankful and grateful to our investors, new and long-standing, who have entrusted their capital with us, and we continue our mission to working with the world’s best Pre-Seed and Seed investors globally. We are also thankful and grateful to the remarkable GPs that we work with daily, working collaboratively as true partners.

We are always looking to add new members to our ecosystem so please reach out—we look forward to meeting you!

Introduction

07/06/2023

We are thrilled to welcome Hillary Tyree as Cendana Capital's new Head of Platform and Operations. Many of you know Hillary from Silicon Valley Bank, where she worked in a similar role for the bank’s emerging managers practice. For those who don't yet know Hillary, she is talented, proactive, entrepreneurial, and of the highest integrity--qualities we seek at Cendana. Just as importantly, she is a very nice person and a pleasure to work with!

From our inception over ten years ago, Cendana has sought to be a different kind of LP: one that works closely with GPs and LPs, and recognizes that our success is tied together through proactive collaboration. We believe our approach has helped our GPs and LPs in many ways, including generating alpha and expanding opportunities. We are confident Hillary will take our collaborative efforts to a higher level to help Cendana remain the leading LP in seed venture capital.

02/03/2023

One of our newest fund investments is Behind Genius Ventures, founded by Paige Finn Doherty. She recently interviewed our partner Kelli Fontaine about what Cendana Capital looks for and how we work with portfolio funds and our LPs.

‎Business · 2023

11/12/2022

We at Cendana Capital are actively making commitments to new fund managers. However, given the state of the markets and the macro, institutional LPs (in rank order of likelihood) will:

1) not add new managers for the next 12-18 months;

2) reduce commitment sizes to existing managers;

3) decline to re-up with existing managers;

4) reduce allocation to VC because of the denominator effect

However, sophisticated LPs know you can’t time technology innovation and will remain dedicated to a robust VC allocation.

VC firms have raised a record $151 billion from their investors this year. But for newer VCs, many of who are from underrepresented groups, fundraising has become paradoxically harder.

11/03/2022

A great time to have dry powder.

Limited partners who back venture funds still seek access to startups, which have outperformed other asset classes during recessions.

09/13/2022

Haven’t heard of down rounds yet, probably because of the VC summer break and VCs sitting on hands. But now — it’s Revenge of the Nerds 🤓We’ll see a lot of rounds, particularly Series A, trying to get done.

09/08/2022

Remarkably, Arcadia now manages over 1 gigawatt of community solar, which is enough to power 150,000 households for a year and reduces the equivalent of 1 billion tons of coal annually 💥💥💥

Arcadia is the first and only community solar provider with more than one gigawatt of capacity under management. Explore how we got here and what this means for decarbonization.

07/12/2022

Great to see Susa Ventures’ launch of Humba! A number of brainstorming sessions and a walk through sunny Aspen last year helped crystallize this within ’s Nano program. Super excited for our Susa partners 🚀🚀🚀

A Scout & Supportive Investment Fund by Susa Ventures