Bessemer Venture Partners

Overview

Bessemer Venture Partners is a venture capital firm whose roots go back more than a century to the Phipps family’s steel-era fortune, now investing in early- and growth-stage technology companies across enterprise, deep tech, fintech, consumer, and healthcare (TechCrunch). The firm is known for early bets on companies such as Shopify and Pinterest, for a public “Anti-Portfolio” listing the famous deals it passed on, and for closing a $3.85 billion early-stage fund in 2022, then the largest in its nearly 50-year fund history (PitchBook).

This profile covers the venture firm Bessemer Venture Partners — not Bessemer Trust, the separate family-wealth adviser that shares the Phipps lineage. Most coverage of the firm is fragmented fund announcements; this profile assembles the arc from its steel-era origins through 2012 to its 2022 expansion into growth buyouts.

From a steel fortune to Sand Hill Road

The firm’s own announcement describes it as “born from innovations in steel more than a century ago,” and TechCrunch in 2018 described it as an investment firm founded more than 100 years ago, based in Redwood City and backing global startups at the seed, Series A, and Series B stages (citybiz; TechCrunch). VentureBeat, profiling the firm after its record 2012, called it one of the oldest firms on Sand Hill Road, with a cultivated reputation for being approachable and “down to earth” while rivals chased headlines (VentureBeat). That low profile was deliberate: partners told VentureBeat that “low bravado hurts us,” but that their style was to “roll up your sleeves, sit next to the entrepreneur and try to work through the nitty gritty problems” (VentureBeat).

The firm’s scale by the early 2010s was already substantial. In 2011 it closed a $1.6 billion fund and expanded its presence to 15 countries, with six offices around the world and deal sizes ranging from $100,000 to $50 million (VentureBeat). Its hottest investments at the time included LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Yelp; by 2018, 122 portfolio companies had gone public (TechCrunch). The firm’s global teams now span Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York City, Boston, London, Tel Aviv, Beijing, and Bangalore (CTech).

The Anti-Portfolio and the record year of 2012

Bessemer’s best-known cultural tradition is its annual “Anti-Portfolio,” in which the partners publicly confess the deals they missed — giants such as eBay and FedEx — while most venture firms keep their failures private (VentureBeat).

The tradition was on full display after 2012, when the media-shy firm had what VentureBeat called plenty of reasons to celebrate: five portfolio IPOs, capped by Eloqua — which had gone public in August — being bought by Oracle for $871 million (VentureBeat). Bessemer earned a spot among the top three venture firms for total IPOs in 2012, according to the National Venture Capital Association, with total exits valued at $15.665 billion (VentureBeat). The pattern continued into the firm’s cloud era: PitchBook’s notable early-stage investments for the firm include Pinterest, Shopify, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, and Toast (PitchBook).

The 2022 mega-fund and the move into buyouts

In September 2022, Bessemer raised a $3.85 billion fund, BVP XII, the largest vehicle of the firm’s nearly 50-year history and the ninth-largest individual US venture fund ever raised, according to PitchBook data (PitchBook). The fund invests primarily in early-stage companies in enterprise, deep tech, fintech, consumer, and healthcare, and it arrived just 18 months after the firm’s previous $2.48 billion vehicle — a sharp quickening from its previous roughly three-year cadence (PitchBook). Alongside it, Bessemer closed its first private-equity fund, the $780 million BVP Forge, aimed at majority or significant-minority investments in software and tech-enabled services businesses with revenues between $10 million and $50 million (PitchBook).

The expansion came with a structural change: the firm elected to become a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission, opening the ability to invest across a wider range of assets at various stages, according to its own announcement (citybiz). The same announcement put the firm’s 2021 outcomes at 12 IPOs, five public listings, and nine M&A exits (citybiz). One durable geographic thread is Israel, where Bessemer has invested for more than three decades and ranks among the most active funds in the country, with more than $1 billion invested over the last decade across 60 startups including Fiverr and Wix (CTech). In fintech, Bessemer participated in Alloy’s $100 million Series C in 2021, alongside Canapi Ventures, Avid Ventures, and Felicis Ventures (Finovate).

What this profile does not claim

• The exact 1911 founding date for Bessemer Securities appears in reference summaries but was not confirmed in a fully-read independent source in this pass; this profile claims only steel-era origins more than a century ago.
• The headquarters city is disputed between sources: TechCrunch (2018) says Redwood City, while the firm’s 2022 release carries a San Francisco dateline. Redwood City is used here per the independent source.
• Assets under management figures beyond the firm’s stated “more than $20 billion” in 2022 were not verified in fully-read sources and are not claimed.
• Bessemer’s reported lead of Alloy’s Series A rests on a tier3 funding republication and is deliberately not claimed; only its verified Series C participation is stated.
• The VentureBeat source date is filed as 2013-01-01 because the exact publication day is not visible on the fetched page; the article reports on 2012 results.