Bessemer Venture Partners is gearing up for its next billion-dollar fund. The early-stage venture capital firm, which had filed to raise new capital in early August, has reportedly set a $1.6 billion target for its tenth flagship fund, an amount that a source familiar with the fundraise tells us is “directionally correct.”
Bessemer declined to comment.
If Bessemer indeed raises that amount, it will be the same size as its ninth fund, which closed on $1.6 billion in 2015. If that’s the case, Bessemer may be bucking VCs’ new favorite trend of raising their largest funds to date. Maybe, just maybe, Bessemer hasn’t fallen victim to the SoftBank effect. The Japanese telecom giant has a nearly $100 billion “Vision Fund” and invests in tech companies, competing directly with Silicon Valley heavyweights.
General Catalyst, for example, closed its biggest fund ever earlier this year on $1.375 billion. And Insight Venture Partners finished off a $6.3 billion fundraise in July — also the most monumental in the firm’s history.
It’s been a busy year so far for Bessemer. On top of working to secure capital for BVP X, the firm announced a $10 million early-stage seed fund, called Deep Health Seed Program, in June. The fund is being led by Bessemer healthcare investor Steve Kraus and its head of investments in Israel, Adam Fisher. Deep Health is investing $100,000 to $2 million into early-stage companies using machine learning to solve problems in healthcare.
The firm has seen a couple of notable exits so far this year. For starters, Bessemer portfolio company DocuSign went public in April, raising more than $600 million in the process. And Workday paid $1.55 billion for financial planning software startup Adaptive Insights, another Bessemer portfolio company, in June.
Bessemer’s current portfolio includes Pinterest, Betterment, Rocket Lab, Toast, PagerDuty, ServiceTitan, Fiverr and others.
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