Dave McClure's 500 Startups raising $50M fund

Dave McClure, one of the most active early stage investors in Silicon Valley, is trying to add to his arsenal.

McClure's incubator and seed fund, 500 Startups, revealed today in an SEC filing that it's raising a new fund. The target size for the new fund: $50 million fund. That's not a lot for a VC fund, but for a fund like McClure's it represents a lot of investments. He plows an average of $50,000 into about two startups a week. To date, 500 Startups has made about 260 investments, including Twillio, Hipster and Udemy.

His approach is to spread his bets, looking for niche markets that could be big -- as in the $100 million to $200 million range -- but not necessarily gigantic. McClure, who was part of early team at PayPal, is a big presence in Silicon Valley, and a loud advocate for startups and making the venture capital field more efficient. Just today, he wrote a blog post titled, "Scaling Venture Capital. We suck. We can do better."

McClure's a big believer in funding startups outside the U.S. and has been building his presence across the globe -- in Brazil, Mexico, India and elsewhere. Last December, he and his team held a Geeks-on-a-plane trip to India. Here's a video about it.

McClure joined me last week for an event at CNET's headquarters in San Francisco, where we talked about the investing climate. Check it out here.