With His New Fund, This Investor Aims to Win Over Private Equity Skeptics

Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro raises $250 million to create a ‘long-term home for extraordinary consumer brands.’

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER @ALICDONALDSON

Illustration: Getty Images

Craig Shapiro has a track record of predicting what consumers want. Since launching his venture capital firm, Collaborative Fund, in 2010, Shapiro and his team of investors at the New York City-based firm have backed Kickstarter, Lyft, Olipop, Magic Spoon, Smash Kitchen, and Whoop. Now, he is turning his focus from fast-growing consumer businesses to companies that are more focused on building for the long run. To do that, he’s launching a new private equity fund: Collab Holdings.

Shapiro envisions Collab Holdings as a “long‑term home for extraordinary consumer brands” that have achieved profitability and cult followings. He sees an opportunity in partnering with founders who want liquidity for themselves, their employees, or existing shareholders, but are not interested in going public or selling. 

“There’s a kind of a problem here that nobody else is really working on,” Shapiro tells Inc. The idea came from conversations he had with entrepreneurs who kept raising this pain point, he adds. 

“In a world where so much focus and money is flowing into AI, there are some really, really wonderful businesses that are just overlooked,” says Shapiro. “There are some really beloved brands that are profitable and growing but are not on a path to IPO or have some really big exit, and we want to be a partner to them, to provide them capital and support to keep going.” 

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The fund has raised $250 million from limited partners, according to SEC filings, including from Tristan Walker, founder of Walker & Company, a consumer packaged goods company that sells grooming products for people of color, and Walter Robb, former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market. 

“I spent years at Whole Foods watching the best consumer brands in the country come through our doors. Some of those founders were building toward a big exit, and a lot of them got one. But there was always this other group, just as talented, who wanted to keep running their companies for the long haul but didn’t know where to turn for capital,” says Robb, who compared the fund’s decade-long investment horizon to family offices. 

For Walker, an Andreessen Horowitz alum, who raised more than $30 million in funding for his consumer packaged goods startup before it was acquired by Procter & Gamble in 2018 for a sum reportedly between $20 million and $40 million, Collab Holdings offers an option was not available to him and other founders. “The traditional venture capital model is often at odds with building a ‘100-year company.’ It forces a growth-at-all-costs mentality,” says Walker, who now sits on the board of Shake Shack.  “We’ve been missing a vehicle like Collab Holdings that prioritizes durability over a quick exit.”

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