Copper Sky Capital raises $300 million fund for non-coastal startups

Copper Sky Capital is raising a $300 million second fund, according to a regulatory filing, after rebranding from AZ-VC on Feb. 25 and widening its reach from Arizona to North America. The Scottsdale-based firm still plans to back Seed and Series A companies, with a focus on AI software and founders outside Silicon Valley, New York and Boston.

Jack Selby, Copper Sky’s co-managing partner, built his reputation far from Arizona’s startup scene. He is a former PayPal executive, the managing director at Peter Thiel’s family office, Thiel Capital, and has lived in Arizona since 2002. Selby has said he prefers to back companies in places where valuations have not been pushed up by the coastal venture market, a stance that gives Copper Sky a different sourcing edge than firms chasing the same small set of hot rounds.

Selby runs the fund with Jason Pressman, a longtime Shasta Ventures partner, and the partnership is part of the firm’s pitch to founders who want capital without relocating to the Bay Area. Copper Sky’s first fund raised more than $115 million in committed capital, and its portfolio has already stretched across regional startups including Etched, Bluetail, Nuclearn, Stax.ai, Velocity Engine, Soraban, Uplinq, Orama and Peerlogic. The firm launched its first $110 million venture fund in 2022, originally aiming to invest mostly in Arizona.

The most visible name in Copper Sky’s orbit is Etched, which came out of stealth on June 30 with a working AI inference chip, more than $800 million in total funding and over $1 billion in signed customer contracts. The company said its latest financing was a $500 million round in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation, and it has been positioned as an Nvidia challenger in the inference-chip market. For Copper Sky, that kind of breakout underscores the value of a network that runs from Arizona to Silicon Valley: access to elite private deals is increasingly shaped not just by capital, but by where investors are based, who they have known for decades and which founders already trust them to show up early.