Bessemer raises $3.85B for early-stage startups

Bessemer Venture Partners has raised a $3.85 billion fund, the largest vehicle of the firm's nearly 50-year history and the ninth-largest individual US VC fund ever raised, according to PitchBook data.

The new fund will invest primarily in early-stage companies operating in enterprise, deep-tech, fintech, consumer and healthcare sectors.

Despite having more capital at its disposal than ever, Bessemer partner Jeremy Levine told The Information that he is seeing fewer attractive opportunities now.

Investors believe that valuations of startups have dropped amid a stock market pullback that began at the start of the year, but founders are not willing to raise new capital at lower prices. Many startups don't need to raise cash now because they have plenty of runway from the rounds they closed before the market conditions soured. This dynamic creates an impasse in dealmaking.

Bessemer's latest fund comes just 18 months after it announced its previous $2.48 billion vehicle. Until now, the firm had been closing new funds approximately every three years.  

Fundraising cadence increased for venture funds in recent years as many firms, including Bessemer, deployed capital at a rapid pace amid the market boom of 2021. 

In addition to raising a new venture fund, Bessemer has closed its first private equity fund with $780 million in committed capital. The new fund will make majority or significant minority investments in software and tech-enabled service businesses with revenues between $10 million and $50 million.

Bessemer's notable early-stage investments include Pinterest, Shopify,  LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign and Toast.

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This article originally appeared on PitchBook News