Toba Capital


Toba Capital is a venture capital firm based in Newport Beach, California with an office in San Francisco.. It was founded in late 2012 by Vinny Smith, former CEO of Quest Software. The company makes seed- and late-round investments in software and technology services companies. It is the largest venture capital firm in Orange County, with more than US$1 billion invested in about 75 companies.

History

Toba Capital was founded in late 2012 by software executive and venture capitalist Vinny Smith, using some of the US$850 million in funds he reportedly received from the sale of his share of Quest Software to Dell. The company name comes from the Toba Eruption, a volcanic supereruption theorized to have caused a global winter that supposedly caused a genetic bottleneck in humans. The company chose a stylized volcano for its logo.
In its first year, the company reportedly invested about US$150 million in start up software companies.
In 2013, Dell Computer sold its stake in SaaS archiving company Smarsh to Toba Capital.
In February 2015, the company invested US$4M in Irvine based True Drinks, Inc. a manufacturer of zero sugar flavored water products. In August, Toba Capital partnered with Information technology company Pacific Controls to invest US$20M in open source technology provider WSO2. In November, the company invested US$10M in healthcare startup PatientPop. In December, the company joined tech investor Peter Thiel in a second round of funding for London-based freelance technology platform developer Lystable.
In July 2016, the company invested in Provo, Utah-based software maker Grow.com, reportedly Toba's first investment outside of California. In September 2016, the company was part of a US$100 million funding round for agriculture startup Indigo Agriculture, reported at the time to be the largest private equity deal in the growing agriculture technology business sector.
In March 2017, one of Toba's holdings, software company Alteryx, went public, and as of August 2018 had a market capitalization of US$2.6 billion. In May, the company also exited its position in Codenvy, a developer of the Eclipse Che development platform, by selling to Linux developer RedHat for undisclosed terms.
In February 2018, the company invested US$16M in reporting and analytics dashboard software developer Grow.com, and closed a US$5.2M series B funding round with information security company Infocyte. In June, the company announced a US$30M investment in contracts analytics firm Seal Software. In August, Toba Capital led a US$6.4M funding round for convenience store analytics provider Skupos.

Investments

As of August 2018, the company reported over US$1 billion invested in about 75 companies.
Investments as of December 2019 include Conversica, Deliveroo, FloQast, Paxata, Quorum, Robinhood, Sauce Labs, ShiftMobility, StellaService, Strivacity, Transifex, and WSO2.
Prior investments include Alteryx, Bright, ClearSlide, Cloudant, Codenvy, JasperSoft, MobileIron, SecureAuth, and SmartBear.