A former partner of the venture capital giant Khosla Ventures, Andrew Chung, today launched his own venture firm, 1955 Capital. The fund, which has raised $200 million at first close, will invest in startups in the energy, food and agriculture, education and health sectors.
The name of the firm is taken from the year that Albert Einstein, penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming, and jazz legend Charlie Parker died, and the year Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Vinod Khosla, and Google’s Eric Schmidt were born.
The fund’s mission is to invest in the US and European technologies that can be exported to developing countries — primarily China — to solve world challenges across the energy, environment, food, agriculture, health, and education sectors.
“In a lot of ways, this is a very natural extension to the five years I spent as a partner at Khosla. I was helping a lot of different entrepreneurs think through their global strategy, and went to China 13 times last year, which is probably more than any other investors in Silicon Valley,” Chung told AgFunderNews.