Data Collective is a brand new venture firm worth watching for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it's run by Zack Bogue.
Bogue is married to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.
Another reason to watch: The collective experience of the people participating is astounding. In addition to Bogue, the fund boasts three other A-list partners—Matt Ocko, Michael Driscoll, Bradford Cross—and 35 investors who have been active angels.
DCVC didn't name these 35 folks, but did list investments they've made to date. Those include Square, XenSource, Verisign, Zynga, BranchOut, Facebook, Platfora and Apprenda, to name a few.
Venture capital firms have often included company founders and high-level employees in so-called "sidecar" funds, which invest small amounts alongside the institutional investors who typically put lots of money into funds.
DC appears to be flipping the sidecar model upside down by getting its funding primarily from “equity partners,” who come from the ranks of technical founders, executives, data scientists, and engineers.
"The Equity Partners all share directly in the financial upside of the fund. Together, we have the footprint and capabilities of a much larger fund," DCVC said in its launch press release [link, PDF].
DCVC will focus on the hot market of big data, and is looking to be a seed or early-stage investor.
Big data is where it's at these days, with everyone predicting that it will create the next crop of huge enterprise companies. Big data refers to several new technologies that can scoop up massive amounts of data in all forms and analyze it, write apps on top of it, or run queries against it.
"We believe that Big Data, like the PC revolution of the '80s, the emergence of the Internet in the '90s, and Web 2.0 in the 2000s, represents a several-hundred-billion-dollar wealth creation opportunity," DCVC declared.
The firm has already been making seed investments out of its first fund including Kaggle, Parse, and Citus Data. It has a second fund in the works that will write "bigger checks," it says.
The company didn't formally announce how big its first fund is, but PEHub reports it's not expected to be over $100 million.
Don't miss: Big Data Is The Hottest Thing To Hit The Web In Years: Here's Why >
