SYN Ventures, a venture capital firm based in West Palm Beach, announced the first closing of its new $75 million cybersecurity seed fund. The firm expects to do a final close later this quarter.
The SYN Seed Fund will focus on investing in transformational solutions, not incremental features, where there is an opportunity to reduce technology risk, address the talent gap and help automate and enhance security programs, the firm said.
Syn Ventures says the new fund is the first one of its kind focused on seed-stage cybersecurity ventures. Marcio Lempert, based in Tel Aviv, has joined SYN as a venture partner with the launch of the SYN Seed Fund.
Led by Jay Leek, managing partner and co-founder, SYN Ventures is a venture capital firm with over $600 million under management focused on investing in security companies in the cybersecurity, industrial security, national defense, privacy, regulatory compliance, and data governance industries.
“We’ve reviewed over 100 of the approximately 350 available seed investment opportunities in market since the launch of our first fund in 2021, without a concrete focus on the seed stage. It became wildly apparent the U.S. industry needs a dedicated fund to address this opportunity to help these founders meet the distinct challenges at this stage of a company’s development and growth – and SYN Ventures has stepped forward,” said Leek.
“The SYN Ventures Seed Fund will partner with best-in-class teams and strategies at their earliest stage, collaborate with founders and assist them with everything from hiring, operations, and board governance to collaborating on their product roadmap,” added Dan Burns, Investment Committee chairman for the SYN Seed Fund.
Before founding SYN Ventures, Leek was a co-founder of ClearSky Security and a former Blackstone CISO (chief information security officer). His co-founder, Managing Partner Patrick Heim, was a partner and CISO for ClearSky Security, former head of security at Dropbox and chief trust officer for Salesforce.com.
The firm has invested in companies such as Accurics (acquired by Tenable), Carbon Black (IPO), Crash Override, CyberGRX (acquired by Process Unity), Mitiga, Query AI, Refine Intelligence, Revelstoke, SynSaber and Synqly.
SYN Ventures last year announced closing a $300 million fund for early-stage investments in cybersecurity startups. In 2021, the firm launched a $165 million fund.
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