Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners
Founded 2000
Founder Chris Schaepe, Barry Eggers, Ravi Mhatre, and Peter Nieh
Headquarters Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, California, United States
Key people
Andrew Moley, Arif Janmohamed, Barry Eggers, Bejul Somaia, Bipul Sinha, Chris Schaepe, David Dubick, David Gussarsky, Jeremy Liew, John Vrionis, Justin Caldbeck, Peter Nieh, Ravi Mhatre, Yoni Cheifetz
Total assets Over $3 billion
Website www.lsvp.com

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm focusing on early and expansion stage investments in the consumer, enterprise technology and cleantech markets.[1]

Lightspeed Venture Partners has backed more than 200 companies, including Brocade (BRCD),[1] DoubleClick (acquired by Google after going public), Nicira (acquired by VMware),[2] Playdom (acquired, DIS),[3] Pliant Technology (acquired, SanDisk),[4] XtremeIO (acquired, EMC),[5] Blue Nile (NILE),[1] Fusion-io (FIO),[1] Phone.com (OPWV),[1] Informatica (INFA), and Solazyme (SZYM).[6] The fund has 24 early stage enterprise investments that have gone public, the most of any fund in the world.

Lightspeed Venture Partners invests in the U.S. and internationally, with investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, India, Israel, and China with Lightspeed China Partners. The team is currently investing out of Lightspeed X, a $1 billion fund.[7] Recently it has invested in 'Vee (application)' which is a mobile dating application by GetVee Technologies Private Limited (an India based startup).[8]

History

The firm was founded in October 2000 by Chris Schaepe, Barry Eggers, Ravi Mhatre, and Peter Nieh. All four were formerly a part of the investment firm Weiss, Peck & Greer and left to start Lightspeed following the sale of the investment management business to Robeco.

In 2014, Lightspeed closed Lightspeed X, a $1 billion fund focused on the Enterprise, Consumer and Cleantech markets. Today the firm has over $3 billion in committed capital.[9]

In March, 2016 Lightspeed raised two new funds totaling in $1.2 billion.[10]

Significant Investments

Nicira acquired by VMware for $1.26B

Fusion-io (NYSE: FIO)

Linkamedia acquired by SK Hynix

XtremeIO acquired by EMC

Pliant Technology acquired by SanDisk

Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD)

Playdom acquired by Disney

Kosmix acquired by Walmart

Flixster acquired by Warner Brothers

Serious Business acquired by Zynga

TutorVista acquired by Pearson

Ciena (NASDAQ: CIEN)

Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA)

DoubleClick acquired by Google post IPO

eHealth (NASDAQ: EHTH)

BlueNile (NASDAQ: NILE)

Beme ($2.6M, July 28, 2015)

Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD)

Virsa acquired by SAP

Avamar acquired by EMC

TimesTen acquired by Oracle

Telogy acquired by Texas Instruments

Kiva Software acquired by Netscape

Growth Networks acquired by Cisco

Waveset acquired by Sun Microsystems

Terayon (NASDAQ: TERN)

LiveProfile acquired by BlackBerry

Snapchat ($485K in March 2012)

Whisper ($3M in April 2013)

Ripple Labs

Takipi (code de-bugging solution) ($15M in April 2016)[11]

Percolate ($40M in May 2015)[12]

Summer Fellowship Program

Every year, Lightspeed offers summer fellowships to support entrepreneurship and innovation among highly motivated engineering and computer science students. Weekly speakers and angel investors are brought in to share their insights and offer further advice about the start-up experience. 2015 will be the program’s 9th year running. Notable participants of Lightspeed's Fellowship program include Ben Silberman, Founder and CEO of Pinterest and Bobby Murphy, Founder and CTO of Snapchat.[13]

References

External links

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