Bling Capital, one of the more prolific and well-connected seed VC firms, has nabbed another $270 million for a new flagship fourth fund. About half of those fresh millions are earmarked for its opportunity fund, money set aside to make follow-on investments into winners, Bling general partner Kyle Lui tells TechCrunch.
Bling is the firm founded in 2018 by Ben Ling, a former general partner at Khosla Ventures, where he backed such companies as Gitlab and Webflow. He earned his Valley street cred from exec roles at Google, YouTube, and Facebook. He also became such a stellar angel investor (Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, others), that it’s clear that seed investing is his true calling.
Those experiences shaped his VC firm which operates what it calls a Product Council, a network of leaders at major tech firms that help advise Bling’s startups. With the new fund, the firm’s network is adding advisors to its roster from a bunch of the hottest startups including from Notion, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Stripe.
All told, Ling has corralled about 19 unicorns under his belt. Lui, who was previously a partner at DCM, has notched at least 7 unicorns, including names like DocSend and Hims.
In its six years, Bling has already invested in 170 companies, it says, including such names as Rippling, and Vise. The new fund isn’t a huge step up from its last one, which launched about two years ago. That one was $212 million total, also split nearly evenly between a new seed fund and an opportunity fund.
