SC venture capital firm closes $102M fund

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Venture fund group Good Growth Capital today announced it has closed its oversubscribed third fund at $102 million. The new fund is the largest in state history, according to a statement issued at the Dig South Tech Summit hosted by the College of Charleston.

Good Growth Capital is the most active venture capital firm in the state and now one of the largest early-stage funds in the Southeast, the news release said. Good Growth Capital invests in pre-seed through Series B investments in biomedical and health sciences, green tech, data science and hard sciences in the United States and Europe.

In venture capital parlance, to close a fund means to cap investors, according to David Mendez, one of the managing partners. When to close the door to new investors is generally as much about a timeline as the dollar goal, he said.

Good Growth Capital is a majority women- and minority-owned firm which created its first fund in 2017. Good Growth’s managing partners are 60% female and 20% Latino, and the firm reports more than 75% of Good Growth Capital’s portfolio is led by founders from diverse backgrounds. The company has four managing partners in Charleston and one in Boston. It also has a London office and a network of venture partners and advisers in several U.S. locations.

“When Maureen Stancik Boyce and I started the fund, our goal was to develop a team we would want to work with as entrepreneurs, and also the kind of fund we wanted to invest in ourselves,” managing partner and founder Amy Salzhauer said in the release. “Now that we’ve proven our thesis of backing founders who traditional venture investors failed to identify and helping their companies develop into market leaders, our oversubscribed fund close is an exciting sign of validation for our business model and for our strategy.”

Managing partners Carolyne LaSala and John Osborne round out Good Growth’s leadership team.

"It’s been many years of planning and hard work to get us to this scale and we believe being here in the state will boost the business ecosystem in South Carolina," Mendez said.

“The announcement of Good Growth Capital’s $102M fund at the Summit is what Dig South is all about — helping scalable companies and founders succeed in the South,” Dig South founder Stanfield Gray said in the release.