Bessemer Raises $5.75B Across Two New AI Funds — SkimNews
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- Bessemer Venture Partners raised $5.75 billion across two new funds, earmarking $1.75 billion for seed and early-stage investing and $4 billion for growth startups, per its Wednesday announcement.
- The firm has poured $3 billion into AI-related startups since 2022, backing more than 260 AI-native companies across compute, infrastructure, foundation models, dev tools, app-layer startups, and agentic tech.
- Bessemer's AI portfolio includes Anthropic, Cognition, Legora, Perplexity, Ramp, Shopify, and Waymo — an expansion of its reputation for enterprise winners like Box, Docusign, and Gainsight from the SaaS era.
- Partner Byron Deeter said AI-native companies are "scaling faster than any category of technology we've backed before," and told Bloomberg that companies staying private longer has become "a permanent structural shift" forcing VCs to keep bulking up their war chests.
- The article embeds a skeptical aside: Bessemer's positioning of AI as "the opportunity of a lifetime" is offered as "a common sentiment, until the next big trendy tech revolution comes around, of course."
Why it matters: Bessemer is allocating more than twice as much to growth ($4B) as to seed and early-stage ($1.75B), reinforcing Deeter's stated view that private companies are staying public-less longer and forcing VCs to stockpile bigger pots for follow-on rounds.
Ask SkimNews
