Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover has raised another $10 million to invest in nascent upstarts via Weekend Fund. The news represents the firm’s second fundraise after a $3 million debut angel fund that closed in 2017.
Hoover, an investor in Girlboss, audio social media platform TTYL and mobile application performance software company Headspin, founded Product Hunt in 2013 before selling the product discovery platform, where he still serves as chief executive officer, to AngelList for $20 million in 2016.
Limited partners in Hoover’s latest fund include venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Jana Messerschmidt, Ben Rubin, Chris and Crystal Sacca, Hunter Walk, Kevin Rose and Garry Tan, as well as Q&A co-founder Suzy Ryoo, former Microsoft president Steven Sinofsky, &Then co-founder Corley Hughes, Adobe’s chief product officer Scott Belksy, Nurx CEO Varsha Rao, Long Term Stock Exchange CEO Eric Ries and Atom Factory CEO Troy Carter.
Weekend Fund, which also operates an experiment to encourage employees to build side projects into companies called Weekend Build, invests across geographies and industries with a particular interest in audio and voice products, tools for distributed teams and remote workers, and low-code/no-code projects.
Weekend Fund joins a long line-up of early-stage micro-funds (or nano-funds, if you prefer) setting aside capital to compete with the likes of GGV Capital, Sequoia Capital and other monster funds that deploy capital at the seed stage, too. Weekend Fund, for its part, doesn’t lead investments, rather, it writes small checks as a participant in early financings.
According to Crunchbase, U.S. investors raised more sub-$100 million VC funds last year (148 in total)—more than any other year in history.