University Ventures’ fund intrigue

One of the attractions of most venture capital funds to its managers is the money is committed and then legally required to be delivered when the general partner (GP) strikes a deal.
This limited partnership (LP) agreement forms the basis for how much GPs get paid and under what conditions the money can be invested.
It is rare indeed for the LP commitments to shrink rather than rise unless a key man or other clause is affected causing the LPs to change their mind.
So the regulatory filings for University Ventures’ second fund has been intriguing. The latest, 14 August, puts the fund at $136m, compared to the $105m University Ventures Fund I, launched in 2011.
A nice increase but a total fund II size less than the $188m it disclosed in April 2014 US Securities and Exchange Commission filing. And back in March 2013, the fund had still raised $175m, half its planned total of $350m, according to its filing at the time.
The fund’s main managers remain Ryan Craig, the founding director of Bridgepoint Education, and Daniel Pianko, the first outside director of Altius Education, with Gregg Rosenthal, an education expert from Bertelsmann also on the filing as an executive officer. David Figuli, former general counsel to two state university systems, is still acting as a principal to the fund, judging by his LinkedIn profile, although he is no longer an executive officer in the latest filing as he was in 2014.
There’s no update on the LPs in the second fund and information requests to the main investors in the first fund, Germany-based media group Bertelsmann and University of Texas Investment Management Company (Utimco), were unanswered, along with a request to University Ventures itself. Bertelsmann revealed in March 2014, when the target was still $350m, that it had agreed to provide half of the second fund’s total cash.
Utimco’s investment returns filing for last year showed it had just more than $24m in value from University Ventures’ first fund (through two vehicles), up from nearly $5.7m in mid-2012.
University Ventures Fund II is expected to widen the firm’s scope and include areas such as medical education and seed investing. In a July profile, news provider EdSurge said University Ventures had set up a $5m seed fund for investing in startups focused on serving the higher education industry.
The seed fund has already invested in four companies, EdSurge said: CampusLogic, Entangled Ventures, ProSky, and Portfolium, and are included in its 11 current investments.
Deals, therefore, are being done – which is the main thing for entrepreneurs – but the opportunity for learning more about the fundraising process itself has yet to be taken.