Bessemer Venture Partners Raises $1.85B For Fund X, Its Largest Yet

Today, Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) announced it has successfully closed $1.85 billion in commitments for its tenth flagship venture fund (which we’ll refer to here as “BVP X”).

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BVP X is Bessemer’s largest fund to date. In the chart below, we’ve plotted the size of the firm’s four prior funds.

Fund size data for BVP V and earlier funds was not available through Crunchbase or standard online regulatory filings search.

The firm began raising the fund just a couple months ago. Initial paperwork for BVP X was filed on August 10th, just 77 days ago. It indicated that no capital had yet been raised for the new investment fund at that point.

Another Day, Another Billion-Dollar VC Fund

In an ironic linguistic twist, that’s faster than Lightspeed, which also raised $1.8 billion announced in July. It took that firm 106 days to close out its third growth fund and its twelfth flagship venture fund.

These aren’t the only two VC firms to raise ten figures or more for a single fund this year. Heck, it’s the second one this week. On Tuesday, Thrive Capital announced it raised $1 billion for two funds in its seventh series of flagship investment vehicles..

Beyond these examples, Crunchbase News identified at least 20 VC funds announced in 2018 that top out at $1 billion or more. In the table below we’ve highlighted a selection of them.

Bessemer’s Investments

Many of the largest funds raised this year were raised by firms with global scope. In its announcement, BVP says that 30 percent of its portfolio companies are headquartered outside the U.S. BVP says that “The firm will keep its global focus with BVP X and [will] continue to bring this global exposure and experience to its portfolio companies.”

Bessemer Venture Partners is a multi-stage investor that writes a wide range of check sizes, “from $50,000 to $100 million,” the firm said in its press release.

Over the course of 2018, BVP led a number of very large venture capital deals. Bessemer’s biggest lead rounds this year include:

• A $50 million Series C round led by marketing automation startup Pipedrive.
• $37 million in Series A investment in esports team Team SoloMid.
• Leading healthcare analytics company Qventus’s $30 million Series B round.

BVP’s Exits

Bessemer Venture Partners says it’s advised 122 companies “from their early days to their public debuts.” Crunchbase data shows a total of 172 exits for the firm, which also includes acquisitions of its portfolio companies.

A few of those notable exits include video game streaming platform Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million, Glint, which was acquired by LinkedIn (another former BVP company), earlier this month. Yelp, Adaptive Insights, Mindbody, and Shopify also enjoyed early support from BVP during their time as private companies.

With billions of dollars under management and a decades-long track record, BVP is one of the more entrenched incumbents in the industry. With another $1.85 billion to dole out, the firm will likely remain a competitive influencer in the global venture capital ecosystem.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias