The investment fund by Bessemer will focus on health, tech, and other investments and support promising investors in these sectors.
American venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners has launched a $3.85 billion early-stage investment fund. The fund named BVP XII is Bessemer Venture Partners’ twelfth flagship fund.
Investing early and sticking with promising entrepreneurs is one of the key pillars of Bessemer Venture Capital. According to the announcement, the BVP XII will allow the firm to continue backing entrepreneurs at scale. Also, the new development is a testament to Bessemer’s established focus on early-stage investments.
BVP XII will concentrate on global early-stage investments in the deep tech, enterprise, fintech, health care, and consumer industries. Bessemer will allow its partners to continue investing early in promising technology firms, and will support these firms and their founders at every stage of the journey.
Bessemer has a portfolio of over 200 companies spanning different industries. The firm also boasts more than $20 billion in assets under management. A few months ago, Bessemer unveiled a $250 million fund to invest in decentralized technology. The investment focuses on supporting founders building companies across DeFi, Consumer, Infrastructure, and other enabling technologies.
Earlier Bessemer Investments
In 2011, Bessemer Ventures Partners made an early-stage investment in Pinterest. At the time, Jeremy Levine, who led the investment, said:
“Five or six years ago, in the pre-TechCrunch era when most venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road and in Silicon Valley wouldn’t touch a consumer company with a 10-foot pole (“consumer” was almost a dirty word), we at Bessemer got pretty excited about one idea: that you could build a really valuable media company based entirely on user-generated content.”
Levine added that Bessemer made multiple investments between 2005 and 2006, stating that all of the companies did well. Named firms include Yelp, LinkedIn, Wikia, and OLX.
Jeremy said BVP was constantly scouting for a particular kind of company, a user-generated products-based content media property. In early 2011, BVP learned about Pinterest and thought this was the exact company they desired. The Pinterest discovery prompted BVP to invest quickly in the firm. Bessemer Venture Partner also has early-stage investments in Shopify, Twilo, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Toast, Fiverr, etc.
Bessemer Announces Another Investment Fund
In addition to the Bessemer Venture Partner twelfth investment fund, the company announced that it launched another $780 million investment. The nearly one-billion-dollar investment fund is for the company’s inaugural BVP Forge fund. The Forge fund will focus on growing software and technology-enabled businesses or services that need support.
Bessemer’s partners, Rob Arditi and Navid Oreizy, will lead the BVP Forge’s investment team. According to Brian Feinstein, the company loves to help entrepreneurs scale from their earliest days through IPO and beyond. Brian is a Bessemer Venture Partner who led the company’s expansion into growth buyouts. In July, the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved BVP’s application to become a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA). This approval would support BVP’s expanded investment strategy, allowing them to invest in a wide range of assets.
Bessemer’s Chief Strategy Officer, Scott Ring, said the company had established a platform for investing across the global technology landscape. Also, he said BVP created a structure where its venture capital and growth-focused private equity platforms focus on fundamental investment stages. BVP has teams of investors in San Francisco, New York, London, Boston, Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Bangalore.
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