Kevin Hartz’s A* takes a ‘less-is-more’ approach with new $450m fund

While AI peers chase billion-dollar megafunds, the Eventbrite founder’s venture firm has gone the other way.

Kevin Hartz, the Eventbrite co-founder turned long-time seed investor, has closed a $450m fund at A*, his San Francisco venture firm, according to Bloomberg. The vehicle pointedly avoids the multi-billion-dollar AI megafund template that has dominated venture fundraising for the past 18 months.

A*’s previous vehicle, Fund II, closed at $315m in June 2024 and was oversubscribed. Fund I closed at $300m in 2021. The new $450m mark represents a controlled step up, in keeping with what Hartz has previously described as a deliberately constrained portfolio of high-conviction bets rather than a sprawl of small cheques.

The framing on this round is what Bloomberg, citing Hartz, calls a less-is-more strategy: a smaller fund relative to the AI-stage giants, a higher proportion deployed per company, and a discipline against following hot rounds at any price.

The pitch is intended to read as a counter-narrative to firms whose recent raises have ranged from $3bn to $10bn and whose check sizes increasingly look like late-stage growth investments dressed in venture clothes.

A* was founded in 2020 by Hartz with Gautam Gupta, a former Uber finance head and Opendoor operator, and Bennett Siegel, an ex-Coatue partner who backed Peloton and DoorDash.

Its portfolio spans developer tools, AI infrastructure, consumer internet, marketplaces, SaaS, and CRM. Cheque sizes range from $100,000 to about $10m, with a sweet spot near $3m, placing it firmly in the seed and Series A territory.

Hartz has spent the past year publicly betting on younger founders, including a notable share of the previous fund deployed into companies led by teenagers.

That posture, alongside the firm’s preference for fewer companies and longer-held positions, has become A*’s identifiable shape inside a venture industry that has tilted hard toward growth-stage allocation.

The wider context is awkward for the megafund thesis. Andreessen Horowitz raised $3bn earlier this year explicitly to bet against what its partners described as an AI bubble; other tier-one firms have raised even larger pools aimed at single-company concentration.

A* is signalling that the seed end of the market still has room for funds that price discipline matters more than fund size.

How well the discipline holds will be testable. Late-stage AI valuations remain elevated relative to revenue, and a smaller fund cannot lean on follow-on cheques to defend pro-rata against capital-flush rivals.

A* will have to either persuade founders to leave more equity available at the seed stage than the going market clears, or accept dilution that growth-stage peers will not. Hartz has done that calculation before, and his thesis is that the math still works when the entry price is right and the company is held long enough to compound.

Limited partners and competing investors will be watching to see which companies A* concentrates its new fund into.

With Fund II already showing early portfolio standouts and the next AI cycle’s losers still to come, the case for a smaller, more selective vehicle is being made in real time.