How Databricks’ $2.2 billion Tabular deal helped Tim Chen’s Essence VC nearly return its entire fund

Tim Chen (Timothy Chen) was not planning to raise another venture capital fund when investors began approaching him with money. A successful investment in data startup Tabular had brought new attention to his work, helping Essence VC attract backers before he had even prepared a pitch deck.

Tabular was part of Essence VC’s second fund and was acquired by Databricks in 2024. TechCrunch reported the deal was valued at about $2.2 billion. Chen said the acquisition “pretty much returned our whole fund” and put him “on the map,” as investors began hearing about his work through startup cap tables, other venture capitalists and founders who shared his advice.

Tabular’s Acquisition Put Tim Chen on Investors’ Radar

The acquisition increased interest in Chen among limited partners, who invest in venture capital funds. Michael Kim, founder of Cendana Capital, told Chen that his firm had already reserved $15 million for Essence VC’s fourth fund.


Chen also received calls from previous investors, including Sapphire and General Catalyst, as well as new individual backers. The interest arrived before he had formally started fundraising.

Chen had not decided how much to raise or prepared a pitch deck. He was still investing from his third fund, which wrapped up shortly before the fourth fund came together.

Essence VC Closes Its Fourth Fund at $41 Million

Essence VC closed its fourth fund at $41 million in September 2025. The amount was higher than its previous funds, which raised $1 million for the first fund, $5 million for the second and $27 million for the third in 2022.

StepStone encouraged Chen to send the necessary limited-partner documents so investors could wire money and wanted to bring additional backers into the fund. AngelList handled the fundraising paperwork.

Chen ultimately moved ahead with the fund, choosing a measured increase from the previous one. He remained cautious about taking on more capital because he still considered himself a beginner in venture capital.

Why Tim Chen Focuses on Technical Startups

Chen specializes in early-stage developer-tool and infrastructure startups. His investment approach is informed by his background as a software engineer and his experience building technology companies.

He was one of the early employees at Mesosphere, an open-source cloud infrastructure startup backed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft. He later co-founded Hyperpilot, an artificial intelligence operations startup that was sold to Cloudera in an acqui-hire deal in 2018.

Chen began angel investing in 2019, backing companies including Jasper, Flatfile and MotherDuck. He also invested in ComfyUI, which was developing a consumer visual AI product based on the open-source Stable Diffusion model at the time.

After investing in ComfyUI, Chen advised its founders to turn the company into a developer platform for the models they were fine-tuning. The company later publicly thanked him for helping shape its strategy.

Interest in Chen’s investment work grew after the Tabular acquisition. By September 2025, Essence VC had closed its fourth fund at $41 million, following approaches from investors before Chen had formally begun fundraising.