Four years after accidentally launching a VC firm, GTMfund founder and general partner Max Altschuler has raised a second $54 million fund. He was aiming for $50 million.
GTMfund is one of a rising crop of “operator led” funds, meaning the limited partner investors are people who have worked, or are currently working, at successful tech companies (known in VC parlance as “operators”).
“They are, for the most part, active at their current company, or maybe just finished a run at a company that went from zero to a couple hundred million in revenue,” Altschuler tells TechCrunch. The LPs include people from places like AWS, OpenAI, Procore, Rippling, and Snowflake, he says.
These LPs are largely marketing and sales experts, known in Silicon Valley-speak as “go to market,” hence the name GTMfund.
In addition to contributing their cash, LPs also help mentor the portfolio companies in sales strategies — an area where many startups need help — and with hiring salespeople. They also help the fund find and evaluate young startups companies worth investing in.
The first fund, launched in 2021, had about 250 operators and just a couple of institutional investors. It backed companies like AI composer Writer (valued at $1.9 billion in its last raise in November), AI data center tech Atlan (that last raised $105 million at a $750 million valuation), and security compliance Vanta (last raised $150 million at $2.45 billion), among others.
With that track record, Fund II attracted 300 operator LPs, as well as six institutions including Bain Capital Ventures, HarbourVest, Inovia Capital, and Franklin Park.
And Altschuler finds himself swept into leading a rising emerging fund.
That wasn’t actually his initial intention. Altschuler was once employee No. 8 at Udemy, running sales through its early days. He later helped with startup community SaaStr and advised for a few startups, then launched his own blog called Sales Hacker, which he sold to Outreach in 2018 (though he has since bought it back). He began to angel invest, writing early checks for Gong and Carbon Health.
People in Altschuler’s considerable network kept asking him to show them how to angel invest. So he decided to try doing that.
He emailed a list of GTM people and shared an idea: “What if we raised a million dollars between 20 to 50 of us and put it into 10 companies and then meaningfully supported those companies?” he suggested. “And it went gangbusters. We ended up raising $22 million for Fund I.”
LPs in the fund can opt to do as much or as little as they want to assist, from silent investing to being highly involved with portfolio companies. GTMfund has also built out community functions: like a deal flow channel where LPs can chat; and it hosts six dinners a year as well as an annual retreat.
“It’s become, for me, just a labor of love. It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “I’m getting the same out of it as our LPs are. I love working with all these different founders, all these different companies to help them on this kind of niche topic of GTM.”
GTMfund’s structure as an operator fund isn’t common, but it also isn’t unheard-of. For instance, Mallun Yen founded Operator Collective in 2019, which launched out of the gate with $45 million, and raised a second $92 million in 2022 and also has an enviable portfolio. Another more recent example is Ashley Mayer’s Coalition which launched in 2022 with $12.5 million.
As for GTMfund’s second fund, Altschuler says the goal is to back about 40 early-stage companies at pre-seed, seed, and the occasional Series A — with check sizes of between half a million and $1.5 million.
