MW: Chinese private-equity firm to invest $400 million in U.S. startups
Naval Ravikant is attempting to do to early-stage venture capital what technology firms have done to every other industry: disrupt it.
His instrument is a website called AngelList that allows for a kind of crowdfunding of young startups.
Thanks to a deal set to be announced Monday, he has a powerful new tool at his disposal, handed to him by one of the largest private-equity firms in China: $400 million.
That might not sound like a lot for a venture-capital firm, but it is the largest single pool of funds devoted to early-stage startups -- ever. And it might be the largest-ever single investment by a Chinese private-equity firm in a U.S. fund.
When it comes to investing in early stage companies, $400 million gets you into a lot of them: more than a thousand, by Mr. Ravikant’s reckoning. And any one of them could be the next Uber Technologies. Indeed, one of the first companies on AngelList, in its earliest days, was Uber.
