Greylock Partners announces new $20M seed fund for micro-financing fresh startups

Reid Hoffman (pictured left), a founder of LinkedIn, prominent angel investor, and partner with venture capital firm Greylock Partners, announced a new $20 million seed fund affiliated with Greylock for small-scale investments into startups.

The seed project, announced by Hoffman at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco today, comes from the $575 million fund Greylock partners launched last year, and each partner can invest small portions of it as they see fit without committee approval.

“We’ve been blown away by how some of the most successful, if not the most successful, companies have started with smaller funds,” Hoffman said. “A fund like this, it allows, for example, me to continue the kind of investing I was doing before and still keep track of potential great startups.”

Four companies have been funded by the seed project so far, though Hoffman said the companies did not want to be named.

Greylock Partners manages around $2 billion since it was founded in 1965, funding some heavy hitters like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora and Digg. Hoffman, now a partner, was the founder of LinkedIn when it launched in 2003.