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Bling Capital, one of the most successful and well-connected seed VC firms, has raised another $270 million for a fourth new flagship fund. About half of those new millions are earmarked for its opportunity fund, money set aside to make the next investment a winner, Bling general partner Kyle Lui tells TechCrunch.
Bling is a firm founded in 2018 by Ben Ling, a former general partner at Khosla Ventures, where he backed companies such as GitLab and Webflow. He earned his Valley Street certification through exec roles at Google, YouTube, and Facebook. He has also been a star angel investor (Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, others), that it is clear that planting seeds is his true calling.
Those ventures formed his VC firm, which operates what he calls the Product Council, a network of leaders at major tech companies that help advise Bling’s startups. With this new fund, the firm’s network is adding mentors to its roster from a number of the hottest startups, including from Notion, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Stripe.
In total, Ling has collected about 19 unicorns under his belt. Lui, a former partner at DCM, has acquired at least seven unicorns, including names like DocSend and Hims.
In six years, Bling has already invested in 170 companies, it says, including names like Rippling and Vise. The new fund is not a big step from its last one, which was launched almost two years ago. That was $212 million in total, and split almost equally between the new seed fund and the opportunity fund.
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