Stage 2 Capital, the first go-to-market venture capital fund founded in 2018, today announced the launch of its $80 million Fund II. Backed by an unrivaled LP base of leading GTM executives, Fund II will continue Stage 2 Capital’s unique strategy of combining deep venture capital expertise with world-class go-to-market experience in selecting B2B software companies and accelerating their revenue growth.
Fund II marks a meteoric rise for Stage 2 Capital, which kicked off with a $15 million Fund I and now sees a 5x+ increase in the size of its second fund. The firm works closely with each portfolio company, leveraging a deep bench of LPs who are CROs, CMOs, CCOs, Head of Customer Success and senior executives from companies like Snowflake, Zoom, Salesforce, Smartsheet, Atlassian, Oracle, Asana, Twilio, LinkedIn, SAP, Workday, Github, AWS, Dropbox, among others to help build a best-in-class sustainable revenue engine.
“The number one question most entrepreneurs asked me is ‘how should I scale?’” said Jay Po, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Stage 2 Capital. A former investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, Jay saw a large skills gap in GTM that impacts a startup’s trajectory and on nights and weekends, he took classes for SDRs to better understand the GTM world. “I was obsessed with solving that question and the idea to start the first VC fund focused on go-to-market became very clear to me.”
Stage 2 Capital officially launched in September of 2018, after Jay convinced Mark Roberge, former CRO at HubSpot who scaled annualized revenue from $0 to $100MM, to join him in starting Stage 2 Capital. In addition to expanding his team at HubSpot from 1 to 450 employees, Mark has advised and guided numerous entrepreneurs on scaling and authored the bestselling book, “The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology and inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 million.”
“The two key questions related to scaling efficiently are when to scale and how fast,” said Mark, Managing Partner and Co-founder of Stage 2 Capital. “We work with our companies on implementing our Science of Scaling framework for growth using a bottoms up sales and marketing model, establishing leading indicators of success and unit economics early on, and coaching teams around hiring based on business context.”
With Fund II, Stage 2 Capital expects to support a portfolio of ~20 late seed stage to Series A investments and to lead rounds with an average check size of $2MM-3MM. The Fund has already announced its first few investments in DeepScribe, Arcade, QuotaPath, and Sales Impact Academy. Past investments have hailed from across the US including companies like Sendoso in SF, Ocrolus in NY, Gosite in San Diego, and Reibus in Atlanta.
“Stage 2 Capital stands out from all other VCs because of the expertise and partnership Jay, Mark, and the LPs bring,” says Kris Rudeegrapp, Founder and CEO of Sendoso, “They’ve exceeded expectations on delivering what they promised and we’ve increased our revenue almost 10x in the short time since they invested.”
About Stage 2 Capital
The first go-to-market venture capital firm, Stage 2 Capital combines capital and GTM execution expertise, leveraging its elite LP base of 250+ senior executives from unicorns and Fortune 500 firms to help portfolio companies scale revenue and accelerate growth. Co-founded in 2018 by Jay Po, former investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, and Mark Roberge, former CRO at HubSpot, Stage 2 Capital invests in B2B software companies between late seed stage and Series A. For more information, visit: www.stage2.capital
