Section 32, the venture capital fund based in San Diego’s Cardiff-by-the-Sea community, has raised nearly $200 million for its second fund.
A document filed with securities regulators Friday shed light on comments made the previous week to Xconomy by Section 32 founder Bill Maris, who started the firm in 2017.
Maris on Feb. 15 confirmed that Section 32 had raised a second fund, but declined to share the amount that had been raised. The document reveals the total so far is just under $200 million out of $300 million the firm intends to raise for its second fund. A total of 48 investors have contributed.
For its first fund, Section 32 raised about $151 million from 32 investors, according to an SEC filing.
Prior to starting the VC firm, Maris launched and headed GV (then Google Ventures), the corporate venture capital arm of Alphabet (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GOOGL]]), the parent company of Google.
The status of Section 32’s second fund has been an open question for more than a year. In late 2017, about six months after filing a document with securities regulators that confirmed it had raised the first fund, the firm filed additional paperwork indicating that it was looking to raise a second fund of up to $250 million. Friday’s filing was the first publicly available update on the fund since then.
Before the new filing was posted, Maris said via email that the second fund was raised “very quickly” after that first filing, and the firm recently added additional capital to the fund “given the progress to date and exciting opportunities we are seeing.”
Since founding the firm, Maris has recruited Michael Pellini, previously CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Foundation Medicine, a maker of genomic tests that was later acquired by Roche, as an investment partner. Maris also brought on board former colleague Jenn Kercher, previously general counsel at GV, as Section 32’s chief operating officer and general counsel.
Maris said in a previous interview with Xconomy that that the firm is focused on investing at the intersection of the life sciences and information technology.
It’s been a big month for Section 32: Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: [[ticker:JNJ]]) agreed to acquire one of its portfolio companies, Redwood City, CA-based surgical robot startup Auris Health, for $3.4 billion in cash. And another Section 32 investment, South San Francisco, CA-based Alector (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ALEC]]), went public, raising about $176 million.
