Four-year-old Eniac Ventures in New York, which also has a general partner in San Francisco, plans to get hip deep in mobile technology with a new $12.9 million fund announced late last week.
At least seven startups have already received backing from the new fund, which is six times larger than Eniac’s first. The venture firm focuses solely on mobile startups and said it plans to make seed investments, typically to the tune of $200,000 to $300,000, as well as follow-on investments.
Startups that Eniac has invested in with the latest fund include BioBeats in Beverly Hills, CA, whose technology gathers biometric data about users to offer health suggestions and choose music that suits their lifestyles; Just Sing It in New York, a developer of a karaoke-style social game; and Reactor in Boulder, CO, an alum of the Dreamit Ventures accelerator and developer of the Winston speech-enabled newsreader app.
The founding general partners at Eniac—Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Vic Singh, and Tim Young—have their share of history in the mobile sector. Harris was chief marketing officer at New York’s Thumb, a social polling app, which merged in June with Ypulse in New York. An early investor in AdMob, Mehta is CEO and co-founder of New York-based LocalResponse. Singh is CEO of Kanvas in New York, which developed an app for creating and sharing mixed media such as photos and art. San Francisco-based Young is a veteran investor, entrepreneur, and attorney.
Some of Eniac’s bets from its first fund have already paid off. MetaResolver in San Francisco, a developer of a mobile media buying platform, was acquired in April by mobile-ad-and-data company Millennial Media. Last October, New York-based Fondu, a community for brief reviews on places to dine, was acquired by Airbnb.
