This all started with a guest list. We were putting together a CFO Lunch & Learn for Fund II and later emerging managers here in the New York metro, and the premise was simple: get GPs who are heads-down raising and deploying into a room for a few hours with fund CFOs who have already lived the audits, the LP reporting, and the back-office scramble at scale. To fill that room with the right people, we first had to figure out who was actually out there.
So we mapped the market using our Venture5 new funds database SEC Form D filings. What began as event prep turned into intelligence on the NYC Fund II+ class, and now we’re sharing it with you.
The short version
- 72 NYC-metro emerging managers tracked (Fund II and later).
- $1.655B in capital reported raised across the class, straight from SEC Form D filings.
- 49 funds disclose a target. Median $72M, average $77M.
- Fund-size mix: 29% below $50M, 55% at $50M–$100M, 16% above $100M.
- Momentum: 9 fully closed, 18 actively raising, 35 newly filed with nothing reported yet.
- AI/ML is now the No. 1 vertical (23 funds), ahead of enterprise SaaS (18), healthcare (15), and fintech (14).
- 70% lead with a named vertical. 23% are deliberate generalists.
Straight from the filings
For every fund, we pulled the most recent Form D from SEC EDGAR. That puts hard numbers on 71 of the 72: an amount raised to date on all but one, and a stated target for 49 of them. Everything below comes straight from what they filed.
$1.66B on the table
Across the 72 funds, Form D filings report $1.655B already raised. Among the 49 with a stated target, the median is $72M and the average $77M. The average runs a little above the median because a handful of larger funds pull it up.
Disciplined sizes, with a class graduating up
The sub-$100M discipline is real but not absolute. 55% of funds with a target sit in the $50M–$100M institutional-seed band, and 29% stay below $50M. But 16%, eight funds, target north of $100M, with the largest chasing more than $300M. Call it the graduating class: managers whose Fund II or III has outgrown the emerging label.
Where they are in the raise
Fundraising status splits three ways. Nine funds have reported hitting their target and closed. Eighteen are actively raising with partial closes on file. Thirty-five have a fresh Form D but no dollars reported yet, either just-opened or filing indefinite offerings. The largest single raises on file run from roughly $80M to more than $300M.
Still a Fund II class
Two-thirds of the cohort (65%) are on Fund II, 32% on Fund III, and just 3% have reached Fund IV. It’s a young cohort, still building the track record that unlocks bigger institutional checks.
AI leads the pack
Sort the class by what they back and AI/ML is the most-named vertical by a wide margin: 23 of 72 funds touch it, against 18 for enterprise SaaS, 15 for healthcare, and 14 for fintech. Tags are non-exclusive and many funds span several. Even with all that overlap, AI still shows up more than anything else on the list.
Specialists, mostly
Even with AI everywhere, most of these managers still specialize. 70% lead with a named vertical: water, defense, beauty, proptech, gaming, crypto infrastructure. Only 23% pitch themselves as generalists.
The bottom line
Put it together, and you get a disciplined, mostly sub-$100M class active in the market and heavily tilted toward AI. Eight funds are outgrowing the emerging label. Most of the rest are betting that a sharp thesis beats a big fund. We continue to closely track the emerging manager ecosystem, so be sure to subscribe to Moves in VC to stay up to date on the latest funds intelligence.
