Bling Capital, one of the most active and well-connected seed VC firms, has secured an additional $270 million for its new flagship fourth fund. Kyle Lui, general partner at Bling, told TechCrunch that about half of these new millions were earmarked for opportunity funds, funds set aside for follow-on investments in winners.
Bling was founded in 2018 by Ben Ling, former general partner at Khosla Ventures, and has backed companies like GitLab and Webflow. He has Valley Street credibility through executive roles at Google, YouTube, and Facebook. He’s also become an accomplished angel investor (Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, etc.), so it’s clear that seed investing is his true calling.
These experiences shaped his VC firm, which runs the Product Council, a network of leaders from major technology companies who advise Bling’s startups. With the new fund, the company’s network is adding advisors from some of the hottest startups to its roster, including Notion, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Stripe.
In all, Ling has about 19 unicorns under her belt. Previously a partner at DCM, Lui has achieved at least seven unicorns, including names like DocSend and Hims.
Bling announced that it has already invested in 170 companies, including Rippling and Vise, during the six years since its founding. The new fund isn’t a huge improvement over the last fund, which was launched about two years ago. The amount totaled $212 million, split almost equally between the new seed fund and the opportunity fund.
