Toronto-based venture capital firm FRAMEWORK hopes to make in-roads in the U.S. tech market by establishing an office in Austin, one of the country’s hottest tech cities.
FRAMEWORK, which also has a Montreal office, told Built In it is in the process of finalizing a coworking space in Austin with the goal of opening on Nov. 1. The company’s partners will be in the market on a regular basis, along with one to two full-time employees as the fund grows.
Peter Misek, the company’s founder and managing partner, said in a statement that the new Austin office presents “an exciting opportunity to build relationships in an energetic, young tech and VC environment, and to grow significantly in the U.S.”
FRAMEWORK announced about six months ago that it had secured an initial $100 million for FRAMEWORK Fund II, which it hopes to close in December at $250 million.
The VC firm primarily invests in tech startups at the Series A and Series B levels, but the company announced Monday that it would soon launch a tool that may be particularly helpful for tech founders in the earlier stages of their startup journey.
With the new FRAMEWORK Startup Scorecard, founders can compare their startup’s operational metrics against a database of more than 30,000 other startups in North America.
“What we have found is that when startups go out to pitch, they share some of the operational metrics that they have, but they don’t really have insight into whether they are in the top decile, the top quartile or the bottom 10 percent of a given metric,” FRAMEWORK partner Ajay Gopal told Built In. “There’s no visibility into those metrics, so the scorecard concept democratizes access to that data.”
Startups that provide their data in the Startup Scorecard can choose to be matched to potential seed and pre-seed investors through the newly-launched FRAMEWORK Investor Network.
“The Startup Scorecard, in combination with the Investor Network, is really what creates the network effects around what we’re trying to do, which is to be able to make the market more efficient, give startups more access to funds and fund more access to deal flow, which I think is just bettering the ecosystem as a whole,” Gopal said.
