500 Startups raising $10M micro VC fund to back mobility startups

Seed investor and accelerator 500 Startups has launched 500 Mobile Collective (500 MC), a $10 million VC fund focused on mobile startups, as per a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The 500 MC fund will be managed by its new partner Edith Yeung. She has previously run marketing and business development for MoboTap Inc., popularly known as Dolphin Browser, a Sequoia-backed mobile browser with over 150 million installs worldwide. She also founded RightVentures, a seed stage investment firm focusing on mobile and consumer internet companies. Her investments include Fleksy, Mighty Text, Pack and Bounce.io.

Others who are involved as advisors to the new fund include Greg Kidd (early investor of Twitter and Square), Jay Sullivan (former COO and interim CEO of Mozilla), Yongzhi Yang (founder and CEO of Dolphin Browser), Joe Wu (co-founder/CEO of 91 which was acquired by Baidu for $1.9 billion) and mFund, a Chinese mobile fund cofounded with Zhang HongYu (founder of PPS, acquired by Baidu for $370 million) and Colin Huang (ex-Google & former hedge fund manager)

An email sent to Dave McClure, the founding partner of 500 Startups for more details on the fund did not elicit a response.

500 Startups is a venture capital seed fund and start-up accelerator based in Silicon Valley with approximately $125 million in assets under management. The fund has invested in approximately 900 technology startups globally since its inception in 2010. A team of 40 people manages seed investments in 10 countries. The firm also runs accelerator programmes in the San Francisco Bay Area in the US and Mexico City in Mexico emphasising internet marketing and customer acquisition, design and user experience, and lean startup practices and metrics.

In 2012, 500 Startups had floated 500 StartupWallah, an India-focused micro venture fund, with a target corpus of $5 million. Although it never made a formal closure announcement of the fund, last November 500 StartupWallah invested in Pricebaba.com, a location-based price search engine for mobile phones.

Till now, 500 Startups has funded over dozen startups in India, which include companies like WalletKit, TradeBriefs, Instamojo and gazeMetrix.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)