Fund performance: Recent funds in UTIMCO’s portfolio make gains

The University of Texas Investment Management Company’s venture portfolio includes bets on recent funds from Union Square Ventures, IA Ventures, Foundry Group, True Ventures, Cendana Capital and now Techstars and Pinto Technology Ventures.

Many of these funds are still too young to get a solid gauge of their eventual performance. But a good number have started well and, through early this year, continued to make gains.

Top performers are those from Union Square, IA, Morgenthaler Venture Partners and Foundry. Big improvements were seen at Sante Health Ventures II.

The portfolio includes 23 funds with vintages of 2008 to 2014, 13 of which had positive IRRs as of February and five of which have negative ones, according to a recent UTIMCO portfolio report updating performance through February 2014. Five of the funds were too young to post return data.

The newest additions to the portfolio are Bullet Time Ventures 2014 from Techstars, to which UTIMCO committed $50 million; True Ventures IV, which received a commitment of $40 million; and Union Square Ventures 2014 and Opportunity 2014. Each Union Square fund won a commitment of $20.6 million.

UTIMCO also added PTV Special Opportunities I from Pinto with a commitment of $6.5 million, the report shows.

At the top of the portfolio is the Union Square Ventures Opportunity Fund from 2010 with an IRR of 62.33 percent. It pulled back modestly from August 2013, six months earlier, but spun off additional distributions. Union Square Ventures 2008 is in second position and made a substantial gain over the period. Its IRR rose to 39.5 percent from 31.44 percent.

Another top performer is the 2010 IA Ventures Strategy Fund I, which is still quite young, but posted an IRR of 34.21 percent. Foundry Venture Capital 2010 made a nice gain over the six months. Its IRR rose to 24.93 percent from 19.76 percent. The fund had an investment in MakerBot Industries, which was acquired by Stratasys, according to VCJ publisher Thomson Reuters.

Several young funds, the 2012 Cendana Co-Investment Fund, a fund of funds; the 2011 True Ventures III; and Foundry Group Select Fund continue to look promising. Cendana’s IRR was a particularly strong 14.07 percent.

At the bottom of the portfolio are two 2010 funds from Correlation Ventures. Correlation Ventures had an IRR of -10.73 percent and Correlation Ventures Executive Fund had an IRR of -10.85 percent. Correlation is a firm using analytics to make investment decisions. Judging from these results, the model hasn’t yet been proven. But it is early.

The accompanying table lists the 23 funds with their commitments, distributions and IRRs.