AAF Management has closed a $55M early-stage hybrid fund. The Axis Fund invests in emerging managers (Funds I and II) and their most promising underlying portfolio companies at the pre-seed to pre-IPO stages. The Axis Fund is AAF’s fourth vintage and raises the firm’s assets-under-management (AUM) to $250M.
Since 2016, AAF has made 138 direct investments and backed 39 unique emerging managers across 43 fund vintages. To date, five companies have become unicorns: Jasper, Current, Flutterwave, Drata and Hello Heart, while 20 companies have exited, including TruOptik, MoneyLion, Even Financial, Portfolium, Prodigy, BetterView, Lightyear, Trim, HeyDoctor and Medumo for a combined enterprise value of $2 billion.
AAF has also backed companies such as KarmaCheck, Pelago, Sure, Shippabo and Nitra with initial entry checks at their respective pre-seed, seed or Series A rounds.
The Axis Fund is anchored by Mubadala Capital, family offices from the US, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, GPs from US-based asset managers, a multi-billion-dollar AUM venture capital firm based in the US and a publicly traded company.
The fund’s strategy is predicated on leveraging the emerging manager limited partner checks to access gated private market data on early-stage companies. This unique data licensing approach provides privileged access to proprietary, non-public deal flow and insights not available through platforms like Crunchbase or CB Insights.
The Axis Fund has already made investments in 25 pre-seed and seed funds and five direct investments into early-stage and early-growth companies. The underlying managers have a coverage of approximately 800 venture-backed companies that were formed between 2021 and 2025.
“Over the past decade, we have found that the richest dataset of private market companies at the earliest stages of their formation is accessed only through LP checks in emerging managers,” general partner and managing director Kyle Hendrick said. “With The Axis Fund, we are combining our fund-of-funds investing track record along with our seed track record under one fund umbrella to generate the best risk-adjusted return for our LPs.”
“Our two-pronged investing strategy allows our LPs to access a beta product, through the indexing of emerging managers, and an alpha product, through the picking of companies to back at the early stage,” added general partner and managing director Omar Darwazah. “This strategy allows us to identify signals from noise and increase our probability of backing outliers – fund returners, 10x cash-on-cash returning companies and seed to unicorn investments.”
AAF previously raised a $25 million Fund I in 2017 and a $39 million Fund II in 2021. In addition, the firm ran a proprietary $32 million fund-of-funds investment vehicle in 2017 for a select number of its LPs. AAF is exposed to more than 5% of the world’s private market unicorns through both its direct investing and fund-of-funds platform.