It was once unusual for venture capital funds to cross the billion-dollar threshold. Now, multiple billion-dollar fund announcements in the same week is nothing to gawk at.
Bessemer Venture Partners, an investment firm founded more than 100 years ago, is the latest to complete the fundraising circuit. The firm has brought in $1.85 billion for its tenth flagship VC fund, its fourth consecutive billion-dollar fund, according to PitchBook.
Earlier reports indicated the firm had set a $1.6 billion target for the vehicle. At the time, TechCrunch surmised that if the firm indeed raised $1.6 billion — the size of its last two funds — it would be bucking VCs’ new favorite trend of raising their largest funds to date in defense of SoftBank’s $93 billion Vision Fund. Well, this is certainly Bessemer’s largest fund to date, but the firm says their approach is unchanged.
“It’s no secret that many in the Valley are raising larger—and larger—funds, and others are raising multiple new funds across different stages or geographies,” the firm wrote in an announcement today. “As we planned BVP X, we naturally asked if we should do the same. But as we thought through how we can be the best partner to visionary entrepreneurs, we felt the right decision was to stay true to an approach that has seen 122 companies go public and helped many other entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to create revolutions of their own. At $1.85 billion, BVP X is slightly larger than our earlier funds but still allowing us to focus on what we’re passionate about making early-stage investments and sticking with companies and their leaders at every stage of their growth.”
With offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, India and Israel, the Redwood City-based firm backs global startups at the seed, Series A and Series B stages. It’s known for its investments in Shopify, LinkedIn, Blue Apron and several others, with a current portfolio that includes Pinterest, Zoosk, Ola, Betterment, Rocket Lab, Toast, PagerDuty, ServiceTitan and Fiverr.
This is the fourth massive fundraise for a VC fund in the last week. Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital announced the close of $1 billion in new capital for its sixth flagship venture fund on Tuesday in what was similarly the firm’s largest raise to date. On Monday, Tiger Global garnered $3.75 billion for its latest fund — the second largest venture fund of 2018 — after actively marketing it for just six weeks. And only days before that, GGV Capital raised $1.9 billion across three funds for U.S. and China-based companies.
Sequoia’s mammoth $8 billion fund, which closed this summer, remains the largest fund of the year. Other new and notable buckets of capital include YF Capital’s $2.5 billion fund, Tunlan Investment’s Xiong’An $1.6 billion Global Blockchain Innovation Fund, General Catalyst’s $1.375 billion fund and Lightspeed Venture Partners $1.8 billion fundraise for two new funds.
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