Vanedge Capital Wins 2023 VC Global Dealmaker Award for Raxium
Fremont, California-based Raxium is building the world’s highest density self-emissive RGB displays. In doing so, the company hopes to enable a new class of smaller and more powerful display products that range from augmented and virtual reality micro-displays to life-size panel-based light field displays.
Although the company had already raised a considerable amount of capital from major investors like Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates, as Raxium CEO Craig Peters and his team went to raise their Series B in early 2021, they wanted to find an outside investor to price and lead the round. “As we went into the raise, strategic interest was very strong,” recalls Peters. “Leading technology companies all saw the massive potential for what we are doing. Venture investors, on the other hand, had been burned many times on their investments in both augmented reality and display technology investments so they were quite guarded in their interest. Still, we knew it was important to bring in a venture investor because of the expertise they can provide.”
Ultimately, that meant that Peters needed to find the right firm with the right kind of vision to partner with. He found that in the Vanedge Capital team. “It was incredible how quickly Moe and the rest of the team got it,” says Peters, referring to Moe Kermani, a Managing Partner at Vanedge. “Our team, technology and strategy immediately resonated with them and they quickly offered to write a term sheet.”
“When we first met Craig, it was clear that Raxium had a transformational technology and they had made huge progress in proving out a number of technical unknowns,” says Kermani. “To us, it was clear that they were on the road to actually creating the kinds of high-density RGB displays that many had previously attempted but failed to deliver. They also had a great team both on the business and the technology side, with an impressive track record of building great companies with hard products. We were confident that if anyone was going to do it, it would be them.”
The Vanedge team played a critical role in closing Raxium’s Series B, making sure that they had the right investors around the table and that the deal was architected in the best way possible. “Vanedge did a great job of attracting the right investors at the right terms,” says Peters.
“Leading the round made a lot of sense for us,” says Kermani. “We like investing in breakthrough technologies that have the potential to transform industries and that’s exactly what Raxium is doing. We were able to come in and price the round appropriately to get the strategic investors to come to the table, which had a big impact.”
