Stage 2 Capital provides Early Stage Software Businesses with Capital and Best-In-Class Go-To-Market (GTM) Expertise from a LP Base of elite CROs, CMOs, and GTM Leaders Specializing in Scaling Revenue
Stage 2 Capital, the first go-to-market venture capital fund founded in 2018, 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, Atlassian, Oracle, Asana, Twilio, LinkedIn, SAP, Workday, Github, AWS, Dropbox, among others to help build a best-in-class sustainable revenue engine.
Read More: Former King Executive and Peakon CFO Simone Goodman Joins Forecast
“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.”
Read More: BitPay Updates Wallet App with Google Pay
“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. 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.”
Read More: Timo, Vietnam’s Digital Banking Pioneer, Partners With Mambu To Expand Services
