The seed stage investors in GroupMe featured a lot of the same twenty-something investors Betabeat wrote about in our Littlest Angels feature back in February. David Tisch, Ben Lerer and Josh Kushner all saw their first big exits when Skype bought GroupMe, and according to one source, it was a doozy.
The seed stage round for GroupMe was $850,000 dollars, and according to sources, made at a pre-money valuation of around $4 million. That would mean a post-money figure of 4.85 million, which, given the reported exit price of $85 million, would be a multiple of roughly 17X.
Local investors including First Round Capital, betaworks, Josh Stylman, Peter Hershberg and John Maloney also scored a place in the GroupMe seed round.
For the seed stage investors like First Round, Lerer Ventures and betaworks, who re-upped in the $10.6 million second funding round at a roughly $25 million pre, the second multiple was a very respectable 2.4X.
The time frame from funding to exit was also very nice. Most of these firms only had skin in the game for a year before reaping the rewards.
As Mr. Tisch told Betabeat for our feature on young investors, “I judge myself by finding a company and saying yes I’m in, then seeing a bunch of older more established people agree to join. We’re all two years in, for us to have exits is rare. You can’t be judged by that, it’s the perceived quality of the deals you have done.”
Well now these young guns have an exit to be judged on, and from what Betabeat can gather, it’s one they can be very proud of.
