HOF Capital brings in $300M for second early-stage fund

When you do something well once in venture capital, you want to keep repeating it, and HOF Capital plans to double down on its strategy of focusing on pre-seed through Series A, now with a brand new $300 million fund, its second institutional early-stage fund.

Hisham Elhaddad, Onsi Sawiris and Fady Yacoub co-founded the venture capital firm in 2016 after emigrating to the U.S. from Egypt 11 years ago. Six years later, they have $1.2 billion in assets under management.

They saw Silicon Valley as a “tight-knit circle of insiders that continually got access to the best opportunities,” and wanted to build a firm that could essentially get in the trenches with its portfolio companies.

“We’re a young entrepreneurial team where almost every investment team member has a STEM background, so we speak the same language as the founders we partner with,” Elhaddad told TechCrunch. “We truly roll up our sleeves and help with recruiting, strategy and anything else a founder needs while taking a back-seat from a management perspective and trusting them with leading their companies.”

Six years later, they have $1.2 billion in assets under management. During that time they also amassed a global investor base that now includes 240 enterprises and entrepreneurs. Elhaddad declined to go into details about who the limited partners were for this fund.

Though the firm is industry agnostic, it does gravitate toward areas like fintech, deep learning-enabled software, computational biology, immersive computing, tech-enabled human enhancement and web3. Its portfolio contains companies like Epic Games, Yoco, Looped, Terra and Dapper Labs.

The firm looks for entrepreneurs that have a deep understanding of market opportunities, are competitive — what Elhaddad referred to as “focused on building a defensible moat for their business” — and those that are “doing their life’s work, not another stint on their resume and seek to create impactful generational companies.”

“We always try to imagine what the world will look like in 10 to 20 years, and how tech can create massive positive change,” Elhaddad added. “That’s how we land on the themes that we invest in today. It’s beyond exciting to play a role in areas with unbounded potential for value creation.”

The new fund complements the firm’s ability to follow on in multiple rounds through the lifecycle of the company, from pre-seed to pre-IPO or token listing, one of the things Elhaddad says makes HOF Capital unique.

HOF Capital has made a number of investments already from Fund II, including HitPay (no-code fintech and e-commerce platform), Jambo (web3 super-app), Reframe (digital health app), Teiko Bio (machine learning-enabled precision medicine), Ghost Financial (cash-back credit card for restaurants) and Trace Finance (cryptocurrency-enabled financial products).