LACERA invests $75m in GGV’s top-up fund

The information was disclosed in the agenda for the pension system's board of investments meeting on February 11.

The vehicle, GGV Capital Select, is seeking to raise $450 million, according to a filing. It comes several months after the firm closed its latest main VC fund - GGV Capital V - at $620 million; LACERA committed up to $100 million to Fund V. The pension system was also an investor in GGV's fourth fund, which closed at $509 million in 2011.

LPs in Fund V included University of California Regents and University of Texas Investment Management Company. The former was an investor in Fund IV while the latter represented a new relationship.

GGV, which has $2.2 billion assets under management, was founded in 2000 and has offices in Silicon Valley and Shanghai. It invests in early- and growth-stage companies across the internet and digital media, cloud computing and mobile industries in the US and China. It typically leads expansion rounds of financing worth $5-25 million.

Seventeen GGV portfolio companies have completed IPOs across six exchanges since 2010, including China-focused players Qunar, Tudou, YY, and Alibaba - in which GGV invested in 2002.

The firm's managing partners are Jixun Foo, Jenny Lee, Hany Nada, Jeff Richards, Glenn Solomon and Hans Tung. Tung joined in 2013 from Qiming Venture Partners where he was Beijing managing partner. GGV also hired David Zhu, former COO of Chinese internet giant Baidu, as a venture partner.

Already well-established in the US, top-up funds - that allow venture capital firms to continue supporting companies that choose to raise increasingly large sums of private funding rather than go public as soon as possible - are catching on in Asia.

Among the China VC firms, Morningside Technologies closed its third China technology, media and telecom-focused fund in February 2014 at $412 million. In addition to raising $279 million for the main vehicle, Morningside China TMT Fund III, the firm received $40 million for a parallel co-investment fund and $102.5 million for a "special opportunity fund," which is likely to target later-stage follow-on deals.

In addition, DCM launched a China-focused VC fund - The DCM Ventures China Turbo Fund - in September with a target of $170 million that will make follow-on investments in later-stage portfolio companies. The San Francisco Employees' Retirement System (SFERS) committed $25 million in the fund. The GP closed its main fund - DCM II - at $330 million in March last year.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Fundraising
• Venture
• China
• LPs
• GGV Capital
• Venture
• Fundraising
• TMT