Boulder VC firm adds partners, targets eight figures for first ‘deep tech’ fund

Massive VC, which startup veteran David Mandell and ex-Techstars partner Ari Newman founded in 2020, has added two partners amid its push to raise an eight-figure fund — its first ever.

Maggie Rodney, who has been with Massive since 2022 as principal, jumped into the firm’s masthead while Matthew Klein joined the team as well.

“Colorado needs an investor, a face and a name here that’s really rooted in deep technology,” Klein said.

Klein founded his own company and investment firm before working for J.P. Morgan Private Bank. There, he was an executive on the innovation economy team, where he consulted with founders and VCs and got introduced to the Massive team.

“It’s the next big cycle in venture capital, and that’s who we want to be,” he said of deep tech and Massive. “We want to be one of those major players in the market even though we’re deploying capital nationally.”

The firm invests in sectors like quantum, space, energy and infrastructure for artificial intelligence. Over the past six years, it has invested $10 million in 16 companies. Four of those, including Boulder cloud storage company Suite Studios, are in Colorado.

While many VCs invest in early-stage, unproven companies and hope a few make it big, Massive invests in more mature companies that reach milestones the firm calls “inflection points.” That can include hitting a certain amount of revenue or becoming a market leader.

“We wanted our money going into industries and technologies that we really believed were inevitable,” Mandell said, noting that Massive has $25 million in assets under management. “So regardless of what happened from geopolitical shifts or economic fluctuations, these things were going to grow fast.”

Since he and Newman started the firm, the pair have been operating as somewhat of angel investors. They put their own money into fledgling companies using an entity called a special purpose vehicle, which allowed them to invest in deals as they came up rather than pulling from a pool of already committed capital like most funds.

Typically, investors who don’t raise a traditional fund don’t have access to quality later-stage deals for more proven companies. Rather, they pick from a litter of early-stage, unproven companies with high failure rates.

But because of the pair’s professional networks, they could make single-deal investments in companies such as SpaceX, now one of the largest private companies in the country.

That caught the attention of some of their investor friends, who started investing alongside Newman and Mandell.

“We were getting interesting opportunities to … late-stage, really differentiated deal flow. And our friends were like, ‘Hey, I don’t see those deals. How can I get in on this?’” Mandell said. “So we went from the two of us to about 60 people kind of overnight.”

But as deep tech has become more popular and the rate of their investments picked up, the team realized it needed to pivot to the more traditional model of raising a fund. Instead of “herding cats” on a deal-by-deal basis, raising the fund will allow them to move quicker on deals. They expect to make six to eight investments a year out of that pot with a check size of $750,000 to $3 million.

“We had the real advantage of being able to see what was happening in the markets and immediately say that we’re really going to hone in on this deep tech thing right when it’s happening,” Rodney said, explaining that the single investment model gave them flexibility to pivot when deep tech rose years ago.