Chemistry Ventures is raising $500 million for its second fund, according to an SEC filing disclosing the raise TechCrunch. The figure marks a substantial jump from the firm's $350 million debut fund, which it launched less than two years ago.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the new fund is already oversubscribed and expected to close soon TechCrunch citing WSJ. Chemistry Ventures did not immediately return TechCrunch's request for comment.

Chemistry was founded by Mark Goldberg, Ethan Kurzweil, and Kristina Shen, three partners who each departed established firms to start the venture. Goldberg came from Index Ventures, Kurzweil from Bessemer Venture Partners, and Shen from Andreessen Horowitz TechCrunch. TechCrunch first covered the firm's launch on October 23, 2024, framing it as a case of veteran multi-stage investors striking out on their own TechCrunch.

The firm invests at seed and Series A Crunchbase, concentrating on early-stage startups in developer tools, fintech, and infrastructure. Its portfolio to date includes Granola, Decagon, Persona, Serval, and Nova Intelligence TechCrunch. Chemistry also participated in ComfyUI's $19 million Series A round in late 2024, investing alongside Cursor Capital and Guillermo Rauch; that company, operating as Comfy Org, reached a $500 million valuation by April 2026 as demand grew among creators seeking more granular control over AI-generated media TechCrunch.

The size and speed of this second raise are notable set against the broader fundraising climate for early-stage venture firms, where many emerging managers have struggled to hit even modest targets over the past two years as limited partners consolidated commitments with a smaller number of established names. A jump from $350 million to $500 million inside roughly twenty months, coupled with reported oversubscription, suggests limited partners are treating Chemistry's early results — and its founders' pedigree — as sufficient signal to commit larger checks sooner than is typical for a second institutional fund.

Fund sizing decisions like this one tend to say as much about an LP market's appetite for AI-adjacent infrastructure bets as they do about any single firm's returns to date, given that full realization on a fund this young is not yet possible. The ComfyUI position is instructive here: a seed-stage participation reaching a half-billion-dollar valuation within roughly eighteen months is the kind of paper marker that emerging managers lean on heavily when raising a follow-on fund, even before any liquidity event has occurred.

Worth flagging: none of the sources here confirm actual distributions or realized returns from Chemistry's first fund, only markups and follow-on valuations on portfolio companies. Oversubscription and rapid fund-size growth are meaningful signals of investor confidence, but they are not themselves evidence of realized performance. Readers evaluating this raise as a bellwether for the seed and Series A market should weigh that distinction.

The firm's focus areas — developer tools, fintech, and infrastructure — sit squarely in categories that have absorbed outsized venture attention through the current AI buildout, since much of the tooling underpinning model deployment, agent orchestration, and data infrastructure falls under those headings. Chemistry's stated thesis does not appear, per available sources, to be a pure-play AI fund, but its portfolio composition suggests significant overlap with that wave regardless.

Chemistry Ventures operates from chemistry.vc Chemistry Ventures, and the firm's team page lists its founding partners' backgrounds in more detail Chemistry Ventures. No additional detail on the fund's target close date, LP composition, or specific check sizes for the new vehicle was available at time of writing beyond what has been disclosed in the SEC filing and reported by the Journal.