About Bessemer Venture Partners

• Founded: 1911

• Headquarters: Menlo Park, California

• AUM: $20bn (as of 2023)

• Strategy: Multi-stage venture capital, seed through growth, B2B software and consumer internet

• Track record: Fund XI raised $3.3bn in 2023 across early-stage and growth vehicles; prior funds include investments in LinkedIn, Shopify, Twilio, and Canva

• Leadership: Rob Chandra, Byron Deeter, and Jeremy Levine among senior partners

Bessemer is targeting $4.5bn across two vehicles—an early-stage fund and a growth fund—with commitments already secured from New Mexico State Investment Council and San Mateo County Employees' Retirement Association. The dual-fund structure maintains the firm's established approach of running parallel vehicles at different stages, a model it has refined over more than a decade. The target represents roughly 36% growth over the firm's prior $3.3bn raise in 2023, a pace that tracks the broader venture market's recovery from 2022–23 lows but remains below the expansion rates common in 2020–21.

The $4.5bn target lands Bessemer squarely in the same fundraising cohort as Lightspeed's $6.6bn raise finalized in October 2024 and Accel's $650m early-stage fund closed in late 2023, both of which saw measured increases over prior vintages. For firms operating at this scale, the strategic tension is deployment velocity—Bessemer's prior growth fund invested in 17 companies over roughly 24 months, implying check sizes in the $75m–$125m range if the pace holds. A $4.5bn raise compresses that timeline unless the firm widens its check-size band or stages capital more conservatively, both of which alter portfolio construction.

What makes this raise worth tracking is less the aggregate size than the LP composition disclosed so far. Public pension commitments from New Mexico and San Mateo signal continued institutional appetite for brand-name managers, even as smaller venture funds report difficulty closing. The question is whether Bessemer's growth vehicle can maintain the entry discipline that drove prior-fund performance—its 2019 growth fund's unrealized MOIC of 2.1x through Q2 2024 depended on avoiding the valuation compression that hit late-stage venture broadly. If the new fund deploys into 2025–26 vintages at today's reset prices, that discipline gets tested against competition from crossover funds returning to growth equity.

Source: Venture Capital Journal