Storied venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins announced Tuesday that it has raised $3.5 billion across new funds with a primary focus on artificial intelligence.
The fundraise includes $1 billion for KP22, a fund to back early-stage companies, and $2.5 billion targeted for growth-stage investments.
It’s a considerable increase in capital commitments compared to the last time the Silicon Valley-based firm raised a flagship fund, back in 2024. In that raise, Kleiner pulled in just over $2 billion for funds to back early- and later-stage startups.
This time around, Kleiner believes market fundamentals look particularly attractive for scaling up.
“The AI super-cycle is one of the most important company-building moments in our lifetimes, and we are still in the early innings,” its fundraising announcement states. Kleiner also notes that AI is enabling today’s startups to iterate and grow faster than in past cycles.
Founded in 1972, Kleiner has long been known as a cross-industry investor, active in virtually every popular sector for venture dealmaking. For its latest fund, the firm also identified a broad array of focus areas, including professional services, healthcare, autonomy, security, financial services and the physical economy.
Recent investments
Most recently, Kleiner, like most venture heavyweights, has been focused on AI startups. Beyond that, however, its portfolio companies are a highly varied lot.
To illustrate, we used Crunchbase data to put together a list of the latest reported rounds in which it served as a lead or co-lead investor. It spans healthcare, accounting and cybersecurity, among other areas.
Large lead investments
While it’s active in seed- and early-stage dealmaking, Kleiner also leads quite a few larger rounds. Over the past year, it’s been lead investor in at least five valued at $150 million or more, which we list below.
Of these, the largest was a $600 million Series F for Applied Intuition, a developer of autonomous vehicle technology. The next-largest include a $356 million Series D for Chainguard, focused on secure open-source software for AI systems, and a $300 million Series E for Harvey, the AI legal tech unicorn.
Exits too
Kleiner has also seen a few sizable recent exits for portfolio companies that it backed as lead investor. This includes last year’s largest software IPO — Figma — which counted Kleiner as Series B lead investor.
The firm was also an early lead investor in business credit card provider Brex, which Capital One agreed to acquire this year for $5.15 billion.
Of course, Kleiner also has much more famous portfolio investments in its more distant past, including Google, Uber and Airbnb, to name a few. You don’t last 50 years in the venture business without at least some of those too.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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