Pear, whose seed-stage bets are followed closely, just raised $160 million for its third fund – TechCrunch

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Pear, a six-year-old, Palo Alto, Calif.-based seed-stage firm whose bets on nascent startups are closely watched by early-stage investors, has closed on $160 million in capital commitments from a wide array of backers, including a previous investor, the University of Chicago.
The firm also invests roughly 55% of its capital in founders who’ve logged some time in the working world, including at Uber, Facebook and Google.
We talked last week with Pear’s co-founders, Mar Hershenson and Pejman Nozad, who’ve known one another for 20 years.
Nozad famously sold rugs to tech millionaires before becoming a full-time investor; one early bet was on the smartphone company Danger, which sold to Microsoft in 2008 for $500 million.
Danger was co-founded by the husband of Hershenson, who is herself a three-time entrepreneur who also received backing from Nozad while growing an intellectual property startup called Sabio Labs.
Asked more specifically what it is that they look for, Nozad likened it to understanding “really good wine; it’s hard to explain it in words but once you have it, you know it.” Adds Hershenson, “We spend a lot of time with founders and a lot of it comes down to their commitment, how mission-driven they are, and their ability to attract talent.
Most notably, Pear now features three other partners: Ajay Kamat, who focuses on consumer startups and previously founded the of Pear-funded startup Wedding Party, which he sold to Instacart; Ian Taylor, who heads up Pear’s “Dorm” programs and concentrates on supporting student founders; and Nils Bunger, who previously founded the desktop virtualization company Pano Logic before founding MobileSpan, a maker of enterprise file-sharing software that he sold to Dropbox.

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