Benchmark has raised a sixth fund of $500M
Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture firms, has just finished raising its sixth fund, totaling $500 million, the firm told VentureBeat earlier today.
Partner Steve Spurlock said the firm’s partners haven’t changed, and that its focus will remain on enterprise software, internet and security companies. The latest fund is somewhat larger than the firm’s previous 2004 fund of $425 million, in part because the firm has added two more partners, but also because it wants to invest in later stage deals (which requires larger amounts of money) opportunistically.
The firm hit it big in the late 1990s with eBay’s IPO, was somewhat barren during the downturn immediately after 2000, but has had a roll of profitable returns on investments lately: MySQL, Zimbra, Vontu and Tellme have all been acquired for large multi-hundred million dollar amounts. Other recent IPOs or sold companies were Infinera, Business.com, Good, Avamar, Entrisphere and Ingenio.
Benchmark is known in the valley for having a very equal partnership structure — where each partner owns the exact same portion of profits, and there are no senior versus junior partners.
Update: Turns out, PEHub got to this story before we did.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
