Data Collective raises $125M in its third fund for big data startups

Big data and data science are so sexy right now that Data Collective just raised a new fund, to the tune of $125 million, to specifically invest in companies in that space.

The Form D filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission today provides little detail other than the size of the fund and that it’s Data Collective’s third.

While other VC firms have been creating funds dedicated to big data, Data Collective is focused full-time on investing in big data and data science companies.

Matt Ocko, one of the managing partners, has been an investor and adviser to startups for 30 years, and has invested in Zynga, BranchOut, and CrowdMob. Zack Bogue, the other half of the management team, is an analytics expert, an early investor in Square, and the co-founder of San Francisco-based coworking space, Founders Den.

The firm also has 35 “equity partners” with a significant share in the investment, and are all technical types (data scientists, CTOs, chief scientists) from well respected companies.

“What [the equity partners] all have in common is the opportunity to work collectively with each other and be part of a unified elite club,” Bogue said when we caught up with him at the first fund’s launch.

“Zack and I have been at this for a long time and were evangelizing Big Data when no one knew what it meant,” he added.

The firm tends to invest in companies at the seed or first round stage, and some of Data Collective’s previous investments include real-estate marketplace RealCrowd, agriculture tech company Blue River Technology, communications technology startup Layer, intelligent learning platform Declara, and database provide MemSQL among many others.