- DCM — an early-stage global venture capital firm — announced that it has closed its largest family of funds to date at a total of $880 million
DCM — an early-stage global venture capital firm — announced that it has closed its largest family of funds to date at a total of $880 million. And the committed capital includes $780 million for DCM IX (its largest-ever global fund) and $100 million for its third A-fund dedicated to global seed-stage investments.
This family of funds will primarily target early-stage investments in SaaS & vertical cloud solutions, next-generation B2B & B2C financial technologies, and category-defining consumer internet companies. And since its last flagship fund of $500 million in 2016, DCM has heavily invested in early-stage technology companies with 82% of companies being initially invested at the seed or Series A stage. With the launch of DCM IX, DCM now has $4.2 billion in assets under management.
The limited partner distributions and IPO proceeds for the past three years exceeded $2.2 billion, compared with a historical average fund size of about $500 million. And in the past ten years, DCM’s aggregate IRR (internal rate of return) across all investments globally is over 50%.
Since last year, DCM has had seven initial public offerings, including Bill.com, BlueCity, Freee, Life360, Sansan, UCloud, and VisasQ. And with the last fund, DCM has had 17 notable liquidity events including Careem (Uber), Pony.ai, Wrike, and Musical.ly (now TikTok).
DCM’s 2014 Fund currently stands at a gross return of around 7 times, making it one of the top-performing venture funds of its vintage globally. And DCM’s 2011 Growth Fund stands at over 5x gross return with more than 3x already distributed to limited partners while DCM’s 2011 Seed Fund stands at over 4x gross return.
Other milestones for standout portfolio companies include:
1.) Kuaishou — a Chinese short and live video social network with 300 million daily active users — is one of the highest valued decacorns in the world. And DCM was the lead investor in the Series B round, a stake currently valued at several billion dollars.
2.) Bill.com — a leading provider of cloud-based financial services — became one of 2019’s strongest IPOs and is now up over 100% with a market cap of $5 billion. And DCM was the sole investor of the first financing round and maintained its position as the largest VC ownership pre-IPO.
3.) Sansan and Freee were Japan’s two largest IPOs of the past year as well as the first venture-backed billion-dollar SaaS companies to go public. And DCM was the sole seed investor in Freee (now valued at $2.5 billion) and maintained its position as the largest VC ownership pre-IPO.
In the past 18 months, DCM has internally promoted Kyle Lui in the U.S. and Ray Zhao in China to partner. And as partners, Lui leads investments focused on consumer internet, enterprise software and financial technologies.
Zhao leads B2B software and marketplace investments. And Lui and Zhao join David Chao, Hurst Lin, Osuke Honda and Ramon Zeng as the investment partners for DCM IX.
Key Quotes:
“DCM was the first Silicon Valley firm to invest in the early-stage technology sector in China and Japan beginning in the late 90s. Since then, we’ve continued to deliver strong returns to our limited partners, while executing our global investment strategy across the three largest technology markets: U.S., China and Japan.”
— David Chao, DCM co-founder and general partner
“Our global platform and deep local expertise has enabled us to consistently source compelling investments, facilitate strategic partnerships, and create exit opportunities for our portfolio companies, resulting in exceptional realized returns over the past decade.”
— Ramon Zeng, general partner of DCM China
“We look forward to funding the next generation of innovators. We are dedicated to being a trusted partner and helping entrepreneurs build scalable and sustainable businesses globally.”
— DCM Japan general partner Osuke Honda
“Our investment strategy, globally distributed team and hands-on approach is a key factor in helping our portfolio companies become some of the world’s leading technology companies.”
— DCM China co-founder and general partner Hurst Lin
