Bessemer Venture Partners has raised $5.75 billion in new capital in a single close, including $1.75 billion for seed and early-stage investments and $4 billion for growth investments. The financing will support the venture capital firm’s strategy of backing technology companies from inception through later stages of development, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence, infrastructure, and emerging technologies.
The new capital comes as Bessemer expands its investments across the AI industry. Since 2022, the firm has backed more than 260 AI-native companies and invested over $3 billion in businesses spanning computing infrastructure, foundation models, developer platforms, enterprise applications, and AI agents.
The fundraising also reflects Bessemer’s strategy of supporting companies throughout their development, allowing the firm to make initial investments in early-stage startups and participate in larger financing rounds as those businesses expand.
Approximately 70% of Bessemer’s investments are made at the early stage, an approach the firm intends to maintain with the $1.75 billion allocated to seed and early-stage opportunities.
Bessemer’s early-stage investment strategy centers on identifying emerging technology markets before they become widely established and partnering with entrepreneurs developing products and services for those markets.
This approach has enabled the firm to invest in companies before they generate substantial revenue or establish themselves within a particular industry.
Its early-stage investment history includes companies such as Abridge, Perplexity, Shopify, Toast, and Wonderful, reflecting its focus on backing entrepreneurs developing new technology platforms and business models.
The larger portion of the newly raised capital, $4 billion, will support Bessemer’s dedicated growth investment platform.
The firm has expanded its growth investment activities as technology companies remain privately held for longer periods and increasingly raise substantial amounts of capital before considering public listings.
What originally developed as an extension of Bessemer’s early-stage investing activities has become a dedicated growth platform with its own capital and investment partners.
The platform focuses on making concentrated investments in established technology companies, including existing portfolio businesses and new investment opportunities.
Bessemer has pursued this strategy through investments in companies including Anthropic, DriveNets, fal, ClickHouse, Cognition, EliseAI, EvenUp, Legora, Ramp, ShopMy, and Waymo.
The $4 billion allocation will provide additional resources for the firm to lead larger financing rounds and increase its participation in companies demonstrating substantial growth.
Artificial intelligence represents a central component of Bessemer’s investment strategy. The firm is pursuing opportunities across the full AI technology stack, from the infrastructure required to train and operate advanced models to the software and applications that use those models.
Its investment thesis draws on decades of experience across earlier technology transitions, including cloud computing, software-as-a-service, and the development of advanced computing infrastructure.
Bessemer is also applying its experience in hardware and physical systems to opportunities involving defense technology and physical AI, where advances in artificial intelligence are creating new applications for robotics, autonomous systems, and other technologies.
The firm intends to deploy the new capital globally, pursuing investments across the United States, Europe, India, and Israel.
Bessemer currently manages approximately $20 billion in assets under management and has backed more than 450 portfolio companies, with over 155 IPOs across its investment history.
Its broader portfolio includes technology businesses such as Anthropic, Abridge, Canva, LinkedIn, Perplexity, Pinterest, Rocket Lab, Shopify, ServiceTitan, Toast, and Twilio.
The firm maintains investment teams in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, London, Bangalore, and Tel Aviv.
With the new capital, Bessemer plans to continue identifying emerging technology companies at the earliest stages while expanding its capacity to support larger businesses as they pursue additional growth opportunities.
KEY QUOTES:
“While the playbook has evolved, our conviction has not: identify transformative technology shifts early, back exceptional founders before the market fully recognizes the opportunity, and continue investing as their ambition compounds. AI is creating a generational opportunity, and this capital strengthens our ability to make the first bets on the founders shaping the AI age.”
Jeremy Levine, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
“AI-native companies are scaling faster than any category of technology we’ve backed before. The expansion of our growth practice is built for that velocity, with dedicated capital and partners to lead concentrated, high-conviction rounds in the companies defining this era, whether we’ve been with them since seed or we’re meeting them for the first time.”
Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
