Austin Ventures drops $50 million to form Atcor Holdings

Austin Ventures, a VC firm managing around $3 billion across nine funds, has invested $50 million to try and create a new media franchise called Atcor Holdings. The firm has partnered with former Intermix chief operating officer Sherman Atkinson, who will lead the new company.

Atkinson plans to use the money to build Atcor into some sort of new media empire that will expand through a combination of internal development and strategic acquisitions. It’s not yet clear where Atcor’s acquisitions will start, but the company intends to pursue high-growth digital media, advertising and marketing companies with annual revenues between $25-75 million.

Intermix owned MySpace before News Corp bought it, and as this fact suggests, Atkinson has a fair amount of new media and consumer internet experience. Prior to his stint at Intermix, Atkinson was the COO of Buy.com.

As a side note, this is the second time in two months that Austin Ventures has sunk $50 million into the creation of a previously non-existent entity. At the end of April, the firm backed Jeff Dachis, the cofounder of Razorfish, in his efforts to create an enterprise social-software company.