Constance Freedman and Liza Benson.
Constance Freedman and Liza Benson
Founder and managing partner; partner at Moderne Ventures
Women-led venture capital firms remain rare in the technology world, and especially so in proptech.
However, Moderne Ventures is a women-led VC and growth equity firm that is making its mark as a generalist and proptech-centric investor.
Constance Freedman and Liza Benson lead Moderne Ventures, which made big news in September when it announced it had raised more than $230 million for its MV Core Fund III, bringing its total assets under management to more than $500 million. The new funding will be invested in verticals spanning real estate, finance, insurance and sustainability.
“What prompted Fund III was a continuation of the strategy that we’ve been investing in since 2008,” Freedman told Commercial Observer at the time of the fund announcement. “Under this strategy, we had fully invested our Fund II, which had been oversubscribed at $200 million, and we fully allocated that fund at the end of 2023. Then we started investing in Fund III at the beginning of this year.”
Moderne Ventures will use the fresh capital to deploy in the current venture investing environment, which is among the best in decades, according to its latest newsletter. “The firm is especially interested in deploying that capital to support founders building category-defining companies across artificial intelligence, automation, sustainability, fintech, connectivity and robotics.”
Moderne Ventures will soon announce a growth fund, Freedman told Commercial Observer. “The growth fund will be focused about half on doubling down on our existing portfolios, companies we’ve maxed out of core-fund investments — later-stage, Series D and pre-IPO round,” she said. “The other half will go toward new companies. Core funds generally focus on companies [with] $2 million to $20 million in revenue, and the growth fund will focus on companies beyond that.”
Moderne Ventures is a diverse and woman-owned firm with 70 percent of the company made up of women and minorities. Freedman launched Moderne Ventures in 2015. Its early exits include Porch (NASDAQ: PRCH), Homesnap (acquired by CoStar) and TaskEasy (acquired by WorkWave). Among its other notable investments across funds are Icon, Caribou, Measurabl and Xeal.
