MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Early stage venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners (“Lightspeed”) today announced the closings of Lightspeed Venture Partners XII, L.P. (“Fund XII”) with $750 million of committed capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners Select III, L.P. (“Select Fund III”) with $1.05 billion of committed capital.
Fund XII marks a continuation of Lightspeed’s strategy as an early stage investor (Seed, Series A and Series B) focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. Lightspeed has backed over 300 entrepreneurs and companies that have gone on to redefine the way people live and work.
Select Fund III will complement the firm’s early stage fund strategy with follow-on rounds in existing Lightspeed portfolio companies in their early growth phase (predominately Series C and beyond) as well as new investments in companies that have demonstrated compelling product-market fit, strong fundamentals and scalability.
Lightspeed has distributed in excess of $2.7B in portfolio realizations since the start of 2017 alone, including AppDynamics, Snap, MuleSoft, Nutanix and Stitch Fix among others. The momentum has continued in 2018 with the $6.5 billion Salesforce acquisition of MuleSoft in May, Zscaler IPO in March, and Forty Seven IPO in June. Of the more than 300 companies Lightspeed has partnered with since the firm’s founding, a third have either gone public or been acquired. More than 15 of those IPOs have occurred in the last decade alone.
Since its founding in 2000, Lightspeed has built a reputation as an early pioneer in enterprise investing in companies such as AppDynamics, Elementum, Exabeam, MuleSoft, Nimble Storage, Netskope, Nutanix, and Rubrik. For the past decade, Lightspeed’s rapidly scaling consumer practice has included investments in companies including Affirm, GIPHY, GrubHub, The Honest Company, Nest, Snap, Stitch Fix and Zola. Over 33% of the firm’s consumer investments over the past six years are in female-founded companies.
The partners of Lightspeed represent decades of company-building experience with technical expertise and a deep global network of relationships to help founders, including first-time CEOs, scale their businesses from the earliest stages of development to successful exits and beyond. Most recently, the firm welcomed the Chairman of Microsoft, John W. Thompson, and Semil Shah as Venture Partners, and Bradley Twohig and Natalie Luu as Partners.
Through its international presence and access to resources in Silicon Valley, Israel, China and India, the firm is able to help its portfolio companies tap into the talent and large market opportunities in those important geographies. The firm has a global mindset and is geographically diverse—notably, 80% of consumer investments at Lightspeed are outside the Bay Area.
Lightspeed currently manages over $6 billion of committed capital and is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA.
About Lightspeed
Lightspeed Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 300 companies globally, including Snap, The Honest Company, GrubHub, Nest, Nutanix, AppDynamics, and MuleSoft. The firm currently manages over $6 billion of committed capital and invests in the U.S. and internationally, with investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, Israel, India and China. www.lsvp.com