Website lererhippeau.com Headquarters New York City Type of business Private | Founded 2010 Founder Kenneth Lerer | |
Key people Kenneth Lerer, Managing Partner
Ben Lerer, Managing Partner
Eric Hippeau, Managing Partner | ||
Lerer Hippeau Ventures (LHV) is a leading early-stage technology venture capital firm based in New York City. Ken Lerer, Ben Lerer and Eric Hippeau run the angel fund specializing in financing technology startups. LHV invests in entrepreneurs who are seeking to transform large markets. Its portfolio includes peers Food52, Bloglovin', NowThis, Sunrise, Giphy, VHX and many others.
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Firm
LHV is a seed stage venture capital fund, founded in January 2010 by Kenneth Lerer. Eric Hippeau is a managing partner. Along with Ben Lerer the ~$7 million fund's key people were described as super angels.
Bruce Wilpon, son of Fred Wilpon is community manager & limited partner at LHV.
Other firms with which LHV co-invests include Spark (as Lerer Ventures) Union Square Ventures and Betaworks.
Portfolio
Amanda Hesser, co-founder and CEO of Food52, raised an investment from LHV to create a buzzing place for cookbooks, taking on food projects, helping others with real-time food Q&A and supporting local food producers. It won the James Beard Award for Publication of the Year (2012).
Bloglovin' helps people discover and follow their favorite blogs. The site was founded in Sweden and has over 2 million members, 70% of them who follow fashion blogs & over 90% who are female. Shortly after it took $1 million of investment from Betaworks and LHV in 2012, traffic spiked following Google's announcement to discontinue Google Reader.
NowThis is a LHV startup and portfolio company. It emerged in 2012 as a post-TV, post-newspaper and post-website newsgathering operation based in NYC. The company makes short form videos for social outlets like Kik.
In June 2013, Sunrise raised $2.2 million in venture funding from Resolute.vc, NextView Ventures, LHV, SV Angel, and other angel investment firms like Loïc Le Meur, Dave Morin, Fabrice Grinda.
Canvas Networks, a website centered on sharing and remixing media, particularly images, was backed by LHV. It closed in 2014.
In May 2014, Giphy raised $2.4 million in a Series A funding round from investors, including Quire, CAA Ventures, RRE Ventures, and LHV.
In 2015 VHX raised $5 million in an investment round led by Comcast Ventures. Investors who had previously put $3 million into the company, including Union Square Ventures, LHV and Reddit Chairman Alexis Ohanian, also invested.
In 2016 in collaboration with NBC/Comcast, LVH led a first funding round for a still-unnamed new venture by the co-founder of Politico Jim VandeHei. Mike Allen "will join the company after his run at Politico ends following November’s" Federal and other elections and the new publication is planned for launch in 2017.