Extreme Venture Partners Returns with Fund II
Techvibes reported last August that Toronto-based Extreme Venture Partners was not raising a new fund and bowing out of the venture capital business.
Today by exclusive interview we have learned that Extreme Venture Partners is back with Fund II and the original founders Ray Sharma, Ken Teslia, and Imran Bashir.
“We are proud to say that Extreme Venture Partners has one of the top fund returns performances in Canadian history,” Ray Sharma told Techvibes. “When I launched EVP I in 2007 the Canadian venture capital landscape was in severe retreat. We saw this as an opportunity to create value while building next gen disruptive and efficient companies.”
EVP research has tracked over 1,000 jobs created by the companies from their first fund and Sharma expects Fund II to outpace these numbers given the faster conditions to scale companies in 2014. According to Sharma EVP expects to make up to 40 investments over the life of the new fund.
Sharma summarized the new opportunity: “Leveraging our strengths in mobile and big data, we are now seeing tremendous opportunities in the convergence of software and hardware—the Internet of Things.”
Sunil Sharma (no relation to Ray) will rejoin the EVP. “We are believers in the Toronto-Waterloo technology corridor. The concentration of talent is deeper than anywhere else in North America,” he affirmed.
Sunil’s previous involvement with EVP included running Extreme Startups and he has just returned from a stint with Waterloo’s Communitech as entrepreneur-in-residence.
