Craft Ventures: Operators-Turned-Investors Scaling SaaS Unicorns

Craft Ventures was founded in 2017 in San Francisco by David O. Sacks — former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni.com — and Bill Lee, formerly of Remarq and Big Fish Games. Jeff Fluhr, founder and former CEO of StubHub, joined as a general partner in 2018. The firm's identity is deliberately operator-first: its own site describes a team of "senior operators and investors" who "know what it takes to build unicorn companies because we've done it ourselves", deploying "winning playbooks" and senior talent to fuel portfolio growth.

The fundraising record shows rapid LP conviction. Craft Ventures I closed at $350 million in January 2018, Craft Ventures II at $500 million in October 2019, Craft Ventures III at $612 million alongside Craft Ventures Growth I at $510 million in August 2021, and Craft Ventures IV at $712 million alongside Craft Ventures Growth II at $608 million in November 2023 — the later vintages focused on SaaS and marketplace businesses. The firm invests in seed, Series A and Series B rounds, with each partner investing in their own wheelhouse: Sacks in consumer and enterprise startups with viral potential, Fluhr in marketplaces and e-commerce, Lee in breakthrough technologies and Sky Dayton in hard tech.

Signature deals illustrate the playbook. Craft led Bird's Series A — Sacks's signature bet, which scaled to a $2.5 billion valuation by its Series D. It led ClickUp's $35 million Series A in 2020 with Sacks joining the board, and led Sourcegraph's $23 million Series B the same year — which Sacks called the biggest first cheque Craft had written in a SaaS company, drawn by bottom-up developer adoption at companies like Uber, Lyft and Yelp. CloudKitchens, the dark-kitchen company co-founded by Sky Dayton with Travis Kalanick, and the nursing marketplace Trusted Health round out the early marketplace portfolio.

• Bird — Series A led; the firm's signature consumer bet
• ClickUp — $35 million Series A led in 2020
• Sourcegraph — $23 million Series B led in 2020
• CloudKitchens — hard-tech marketplace via Sky Dayton
• Trusted Health — Jeff Fluhr's marketplace specialisation

Craft positions itself as "designed by founders, for founders" — low maintenance but high value-add, with partners who have personally scaled companies through the same stages their portfolio founders are entering. For SaaS and marketplace founders raising seed through Series B, Craft offers operator-pattern-matching that pure finance-background firms cannot replicate.