Collide Capital closes $95M Fund II backed by Goldman, JPMorgan and UC Endowment
Collide Capital, a New York-based early-stage venture firm founded in 2021 by Brian Hollins and Aaron Samuels , has closed an oversubscribed $95 million Fund II.
The firm focuses on fintech, supply chain, and future-of-work enterprise software startups, writing cheques of between $1 million and $3 million. It plans to back at least 30 companies from the new fund over the next 3.5 years, having already deployed into five.
Limited partners include the University of California Endowment, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Accolade Partners, and Fairview Capital. Fund II is a meaningful step up from the firm's $66 million Fund I, closed in 2022.
Collide has built a track record worth backing. After five years the firm has invested in 75 companies and recorded five exits, with Fund Zero described as top-quartile. The fundraise took 13 months — a respectable timeline in a difficult environment for emerging managers — and the LP roster signals institutional confidence in the team.
Both founders bring credibility from prior careers: Hollins spent a decade across Goldman Sachs, Lightspeed, and Slow Ventures; Samuels worked at Bain and Lightspeed and co-founded AfroTech, one of the largest technology conferences in the US. That combination of financial and community-building experience is central to Collide's pitch.
Early-stage enterprise software is a crowded field, and fintech in particular has seen a significant valuation reset since 2022. Deploying $95 million into early-stage companies over 3.5 years at $1 million to $3 million average cheque size means backing a large number of bets — which requires consistent deal sourcing, rigorous selection, and active portfolio support at scale. Five exits from 75 investments is a start, but not yet a fully proven return profile for LPs.
Collide's Fund II is a marker of emerging manager maturation. The firm has moved from proving its thesis with a first fund to attracting institutional LPs — university endowments, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan — in its second. That progression is the standard path for credible emerging managers, and Collide appears to be executing it well.
The firm's Collide Campus programme, now active on more than 20 university campuses including Harvard , is an unusual asset: a pipeline for deal flow and talent that reinforces the community-first identity that distinguishes it from generalist early-stage funds. In a market where differentiation is increasingly hard to manufacture, a genuine community and a clear mission are durable advantages.
Sources:
Business Wire
TechCrunch
Tech in Asia
Mezha
Las Vegas Sun
Aaron Samuels's LinkedIn post
Image credit:
Collide Capital
J.V.
