A managing director at Peter Thiel's family office is ramping up efforts to raise funds from other investment firms for the super-rich for a bet on US technology companies.
Jack Selby is courting family offices in the Middle East, Europe and central US to help gather as much as $300 million for the second fund of an Arizona-focused venture firm he runs in addition to his role at Thiel Capital, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Selby's firm, Copper Sky, is set to mark the latest fund's initial close in coming weeks after previously raising $110 million for its first investment vehicle, the person said, asking not to be identified as the details are private.
A representative for Selby, 52, whose firm was previously known as AZ-VC, declined to comment.
Selby, an early PayPal Holdings Inc. employee, is looking to scale up his investor base after collecting capital from mostly local firms in his home state of Arizona for Copper Sky's first fund, which has bought stakes in local bookkeeping, construction and hospitality startups.
He's also continuing to hunt returns beyond Silicon Valley after initially shifting his own fortune into tech companies that emerged from California following eBay's 2002 purchase of PayPal.
Among those companies were Affirm Holdings Inc., a fintech firm led by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and Elon Musk's SpaceX, one of the world's most valuable startups. Selby had sold his stakes in both companies by late 2022 when he announced the launch of his venture firm without Thiel -- also a PayPal co-founder -- among its named investors.
Thiel, 58, an early investor in Meta Platforms Inc. and co-founder of Palantir Technologies Inc., has a net worth of about $22.2 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
While Silicon Valley and the surrounding Bay Area remain the dominant region in US venture investing, other hubs for early-stage investing are emerging in the world's largest economy, partly driven by the rise of remote working and the hunt for lower costs.
Regions outside the US's traditional venture hubs on the East and West coasts made up more than half of the country's deal-count for pre-seed or seed allocations in the fourth quarter, according to data from Pitchbook and the National Venture Capital Association. That rate was almost 10% higher than the same period 12 months earlier.
Still, he hasn't totally excluded Silicon Valley startups from Copper Sky's portfolio. It invested alongside Thiel two years ago in Etched, a San Jose-based AI chip startup that closed its latest fundraising round this year with a value roughly 10 times higher than its previous round, based on CBInsights data.