Venture investor DFJ Growth announced Tuesday it has raised $1.2 billion for a fifth flagship fund, its largest to date.
The fundraise comes amid a busy period for funding in areas the San Mateo, California-based firm identified as current core themes. These include AI applications and infrastructure, robotics and automation, aerospace and defense, and biotech.
Though it’s been several years since closing its prior fund, DFJ has continued to actively invest. Most recently, it led investments this year in a $93 million Series B for application security platform Endor Labs, and a $65 million Series C for drone threat detector Hidden Level.
It’s been a long streak of steady investment for the firm which launched in 2005 with a growth-focused mantra. Partners theorized at the time that, as venture-backed companies were waiting longer to IPO, they would require more capital to stay private and continue scaling.
That thesis, it turns out, has proven only more true over time. With an aging pipeline of heavily funded venture-backed startups, and a still-sluggish IPO market, private companies continue to actively close on large growth-stage rounds.
And DFJ has been keeping busy over the years. Over the course of close to 20 years, the firm has made at least 143 known investments, per Crunchbase data. Its portfolio has included a number of well-known names, such as Tesla, SpaceX, Coinbase, Unity and Anduril.
Like most VCs, it’s also invested in its share of underperformers, including virtual event platform Hopin and defunct construction supply chain startup Katerra. However, venture investing is generally about the big wins, and it appears DFJ has plenty of those to counterbalance its losing bets.
In 2007, the firm raised $290 million for its first fund, per Crunchbase data. It raised its fourth fund, a $1 billion vehicle, in 2021.
For its latest fund, DFJ says it initially targeted $800 million but upsized due to greater-than-anticipated investor demand.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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