Greycroft was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof - a venture capital pioneer who'd founded the predecessor to Apax Partners decades earlier and was an early investor in both Apple and AOL - alongside Dana Settle and Ian Sigalow, after Patricof left Apax specifically to return to smaller, earlier-stage investing. The firm built its identity around three founding principles: venture capital as a relationship-driven repeat business, fund economics deliberately sized to stay aligned with founders rather than maximizing assets under management, and a separate growth fund to support portfolio companies at every later stage. That early conviction produced Venmo, HuffPost, and Goop among its earliest bets, and Greycroft has grown into a genuinely bicoastal-plus platform with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, closing more than $1 billion across new funds in April 2023 alone and surpassing $3 billion in assets under management since inception.
Venmo - Greycroft was an early seed investor in the payments app; Braintree, which had acquired Venmo, was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013