First-Time Funds Got 4.5% of VC Dollars. RedBlue Raised $50M Anyway

First-time venture funds captured just 4.5% of U.S. VC fundraising dollars through the first three quarters of this year, according to PitchBook. Firms raising their fourth fund or later took 88.2%. Only 81 first-time funds closed in the first nine months of 2026, putting the year on track to be the worst for debut managers in at least a decade by PitchBook's estimate.

Against that backdrop, Olaf Sakkers has held a first close on a second fund that he says will total at least $50 million. That is ten times the roughly $5 million his firm, RedBlue Capital, gathered for its debut vehicle, which closed in 2023. The takeaway: even in the worst first-time-fund market in a decade, a manager with marked-up positions can still raise institutional money.

Who is Olaf Sakkers?

Sakkers founded RedBlue in 2021 after five years at Maniv Mobility, the venture firm started by Michael Granoff, an early backer of the electric-vehicle startup Better Place. Raised in South Africa, he studied anthropology at Princeton, wrote his thesis on HIV in his home country, and moved to Israel after graduating. He was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces, where he says he held a desk job liaising with the U.S. military and first became interested in autonomous vehicles.

An introduction brought him to Granoff, who Sakkers says hired him on the spot. Neither man had been a venture investor, so they built a fund "almost by accident," learning as they went. Sakkers ran the investment process day to day, backing Israeli founders applying cybersecurity skills to the automotive world before expanding to the U.S. and other markets. By 2021, he says, he was an equal partner in Maniv's economics — but left to build something more formal and scalable. RedBlue now backs what he calls the "real economy": robotics, logistics, manufacturing and energy.

How does a small fund fight the 'gravity of perception'?

Institutional limited partners — endowments and pension funds — have been the hardest to win, Sakkers says. His checks are small; theirs are huge. More fundamentally, he argues, their risk model is built to "avoid getting a zero," which pushes them toward established brands. He compares it to repeat founders who come to be seen as "inevitable," while newer names battle what he calls the "gravity of perception," where a dominant brand bends how people see a smaller one.

His answer is patience. "It's a long-term game of building trust, demonstrating performance over time," Sakkers says. The first fund served as a proof of concept, backed by LPs he already knew, including family offices. The second fund draws on family offices and institutions. In plain terms: he swapped friendly money for demanding money, and the paperwork is still being written by performance.

What do the numbers actually show?

RedBlue writes checks of $50,000 to $100,000 and mostly joins rounds led by other investors rather than leading them. That structure lets it do more deals and be, as Sakkers puts it, "the last investor that they take," promising practical help — introductions to lead investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital, and to customers. Founders expect little from VCs, in his view, so RedBlue tries to overdeliver on support.

By his account, the results are strong: of 28 investments, 15 have been marked up, with a net internal rate of return of "significantly above 50%." The caveat is conspicuous. There has been exactly one exit — an acqui-hire — so most gains remain on paper and unrealized.

Public records back part of the story:

• HappyRobot, backed early by RedBlue, raised a $150 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation in August.
• Westmag, which makes motors for drones and robots and which Sakkers backed at pre-seed alongside Nat Friedman, raised an $11 million seed led by Andreessen Horowitz in June.
• Flai, an AI startup for car dealerships, followed its 2025 seed with a $27 million Series A.
• Humble Robotics, a driverless-truck startup whose $24 million seed included RedBlue, announced a $51 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures earlier this month.

Is discipline the edge, or just good timing?

Sakkers credits discipline. RedBlue publishes thesis essays, including one on robotics, and runs on a custom database he built with Claude Code to log relationships, meeting notes and introductions. That lets him and his lone full-time principal, based in New York, work asynchronously. AI agents, he says, are "useless if they just have to guess," so everything gets written down. He contrasts this with Benchmark's artisanal model, which he says suits a firm with a track record he lacks. Long exit timelines for physical-world companies don't worry him either: even a $50 million to $100 million fund, he argues, can sell stakes on the secondary market.

The broader data is not uniformly hostile to small funds. Funds between $1 million and $10 million consistently outperform funds of $100 million or more at the top end of net TVPI — total value to paid-in capital — across recent vintages tracked by Carta. The plain read: small can win, but mostly at the top of the distribution, not on average.

Sakkers says he never seriously considered a safer job. "Life is short, and regrets last forever," he says. Whether the second fund's institutional LPs share that philosophy will become clear only when the paper gains turn into real distributions.