Venture Capital · Profile from Venture Capital Research Companion
500 Global (formerly 500 Startups)
The high-volume seed investor and accelerator that Dave McClure and Christine Tsai built on a "lots of little bets" thesis, which spread a Silicon Valley playbook into Southeast Asia, MENA, Latin America, Korea and Turkey, survived its founder's 2017 harassment scandal, and is now best understood as a global seed-and-ecosystem platform rather than a classic concentrated venture partnership.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2010, Mountain View, California (first accelerator class February 2011)
- Founders
- Dave McClure, Christine Tsai
- Headquarters
- San Francisco; regional teams have included Mexico City, Miami, Dubai, Riyadh, Bahrain, Istanbul, Seoul, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City
- Ownership / structure
- Private, partner-owned management company; dozens of separate flagship, regional and thematic fund vehicles plus government- and corporate-sponsored programme mandates
- Leadership (2026)
- Christine Tsai, CEO and co-founder; Courtney Powell, COO/Managing Partner (since 2019); regional managing partners run local funds (verify current roster)
- AUM / capital raised
- ~$2.3bn AUM reported as of March 2024 (~$1.8bn in 2021); recent third-party estimates range ~$2.3–2.7bn (verify)
- Stage focus
- Pre-seed and seed (accelerator checks typically ~$150k historically), with selective seed-to-Series A follow-ons from flagship funds
- Signature investments
- Canva, Talkdesk, Udemy, Credit Karma, Twilio, Grab, Careem, Bukalapak, Wildfire (Google), MakerBot (Stratasys), Viki (Rakuten), Simple (BBVA); instructive outcomes: Simple (shut by BBVA 2021), Bukalapak (post-IPO collapse), a long tail of write-offs inherent to the model
8 deals and moves analysed
Each one gets a full strategy file in the companion: context, the decision, the financing, what happened, and the lesson.
2010
Udemy
Seed
2010
Wildfire
Seed
2011
Simple
Seed
2011
Viki
Early-Stage
2012
Bukalapak
Seed
2012
Talkdesk
Accelerator Seed
2013
Canva
Seed
2013
Careem
Early-Stage