Contour Venture Partners

Contour Venture Partners is a seed-stage venture capital firm founded in 2005 and based at 475 Park Avenue South in New York City. It was the first fund organized specifically around the New York startup ecosystem, at a point when the city had almost no institutional seed capital of its own. The firm concentrates on enterprise SaaS, vertical B2B software and financial services, and typically enters positions before a company has meaningful revenue, frequently at zero, then follows on through later rounds. Contour manages seven funds, including dedicated opportunity vehicles that let it keep buying into breakout companies without stretching the core seed funds; the fourth core seed fund closed oversubscribed at $82 million in November 2020. Across its history the firm has backed 105 companies, which now produce roughly $2.8 billion in aggregate annual revenue and employ about 11,500 people, and it has recorded 33 liquidity events. Its defining outcome is Datadog, first backed from Contour I in 2011 and later held again in the firm's first opportunity fund; Datadog's September 2019 listing was the largest technology IPO ever out of New York City. Other portfolio companies include Movable Ink, Narmi, Pendo, OnDeck, SmartAsset, ShopKeep, Slice, Octane Lending, Degreed, LeagueApps, Bounce Exchange and Ticketfly. What distinguishes Contour is duration and locality. The same senior investors have run one strategy through two decades of New York cycles, writing small first checks into unproven B2B software and staying on the cap table through growth rather than rotating out, which makes the firm a known quantity to the New York management teams and later-stage funds it works alongside.