Ignition Partners ready to put $200M investment fund to use

Ignition Partners, the Bellevue-based venture-capital firm, announced Thursday a $200 million fund slated for investments in early-stage, enterprise-software companies.

This will be the sixth venture fund in its 15-year history, but only the second since a restructuring to focus on a “boutique” investment model.

“Originally we invested across wireless telecom, consumer and enterprise software,” said John Connors, a former Microsoft finance chief, who joined Ignition in 2005. “Boutique means a deep focus in one particular area, and we are deeply focused in enterprise.”

Ignition invests over many categories within the enterprise-software arena: big data and analytics, virtualized data center and storage, mobile enterprise and applications and security.

“We are also getting increasingly interested in the industrial Internet and virtual and augmented reality,” Connors said. “We are always looking for great ideas.”

Enterprise software is aimed at large businesses and organizations. Fund V, raised in early 2013, was the first focused solely on enterprise-software companies, reaching about $160 million.

Ignition invested in local companies Azuqua and Tempered Networks with those funds.

With its second fund, Ignition invested in DocuSign, which Connors said is still doing “really well.” The company, now headquartered in San Francisco, still has an office in Seattle.

Connors said companies putting offices in both Seattle and Silicon Valley is a growing trend and is even apparent within Ignition investments. While many of its top investments are in Silicon Valley, those companies often have a presence here as well, whether it is a second office or research-and-development site, Connors said.

Following that trend, Ignition has offices in both Bellevue and Palo Alto, Calif., keeping itself in the middle of two of the largest software economies in the world.

“If you look at where the Northwest is positioned generally, and Seattle/Bellevue specifically, it is real clear that Seattle is emerging as one of the world’s most important cities,” Connors said. “You can’t find a company these days that doesn’t have former Microsoft and Amazon employees.”

In the past three years, Ignition has had 25 significant exits, including the initial public offering of Splunk in 2012 and acquisitions involving portfolio companies Azaleos, Parse, Topsy, Tier 3, Whiptail and Zenprise.

“We’ve had great results getting things public or sold,” Connors said.