Today we are announcing the public debut of our new core fund, Trucks Venture Fund 3 (TVF3), which recently closed on $70M of commitments. We plan on making about 30 initial seed investments from this fund; we have already backed a number of great founders within the TVF3 fund to date.
With the launch of TVF3, we promoted Puneeth Meruva to Partner. We first met Puneeth about six years ago when he inquired about an intern position at Trucks during his final term at MIT. That winter he began as an intern, then became an Associate, then Senior Associate and was named Partner last summer when we kicked off the fundraising and planning for TVF3.
This is our biggest fund to date, but by contemporary venture capital norms we are a small fund with a closely held partnership. We write checks between $500k to $2M at seed and pre-seed, typically obtaining about 10% ownership stakes, and we try to make decisions in about 4-5 weeks. We have a simple consensus-building model across the partnership, which means each partner needs to raise his or her hand throughout the process for companies to stay in our evaluation funnel. We try to unpack risks as best we can along the way using a simple method we designed years ago that has served us well. Of course, we need there to be a lot of risks for the investments to make sense for our fund.
The LPs backing us in this fund represent the largest collection of global transportation players and investors anywhere in the world. Among this group we have a diverse range of vehicle manufacturers, Tier 1 suppliers, tire manufacturers, insurance providers, rental car agencies and airline carriers. To put it simply, it's a powerful support team for us and for our portfolio founders.
Since our launch roughly a decade ago, our investment thesis has been simple: we fund the entrepreneurs building the future of transportation. Over the years we have honed this such that our investments make transportation safer, cleaner and more accessible. In the beginning this was just automobiles, then trucks, then aviation, then bicycles, then aerospace, and just about everything else within those ecosystems. The $5T transportation industry is incredibly multi-disciplinary, and we continue to be amazed at the big ideas that shape the future of this industry.
Here's to the founders who are building big things and trying to make transportation better.
