The latest Kleiner-Sequoia bet: PeakStream

Corrected

Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, two of the better known Silicon Valley venture firms, have joined forces in a $5 million first round in PeakStream. It is a developer of a “new software platform” for networked computing, according to its Spartan site, and clearly still in secretive mode.

Kleiner’s Matt Murphy and Sequoia’s Jim Goetz have taken seats on the company’s board, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, first reported by VentureWire (sub required). (Update: Apologies to PE Week; apparently they mentioned this first).

Knox

According to that report, PeakStream is headed by chief executive Neil Knox, former executive vice president of volume systems products at Sun Microsystems (he left Sun two years ago after the company posted big losses; separately, here is a Q&A with Knox), Asher Waldfogel, a serial entrepreneur who founded Santa Clara’s Tollbridge and Matthew Papakipos, a former architect at Santa Clara chip company Nvidia Corp.

Here are the company’s jobs.

As an aside, for budding venture capitalists, there may be no better way to weasel your way into a job at Kleiner or Sequoia than to work at one of their portfolio companies. If you shine, the investors will get to know you, and may eventually want to hire you on as a partner. While the venture industry had democratized somewhat, and many argue that Kleiner and Sequoia brands aren’t rulers of the VC roost anymore, it is rare that the two join up together (ala Google) and about as good a place to start as any.

(Editor’s note: To our surprise, when we were researching what was publicly available for Peakstream, we found SiliconBeat one of the top ten sources at Google. Our new SiliconBeat Wire seems be paying off. We’ll be reforming the submission and posting process soon, but feel free to keep sending us the news, and we’ll post it unfiltered.)

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