Lightspeed Venture Partners is an American venture capital firm focusing on early stage investments in the enterprise technology and consumer space. To date, the firm has backed more than 300 companies, including Snapchat (Snap Inc.), DoubleClick (acquired by Google after IPO), AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.7B), Brocade (BRCD), Nicira (acquired by VMware), Playdom (acquired, DIS), Pliant Technology (acquired, SanDisk), XtremeIO (acquired, EMC), Blue Nile (NILE), Fusion-io (FIO), Phone.com (OPWV), Informatica (INFA), Fastfox and Solazyme (SZYM). The fund has 24 early stage enterprise investments that have gone public, the most of any fund in the world.
The company invests in the U.S. and abroad, with investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, Israel, India with Lightspeed India Partners and China with Lightspeed China Partners. The team is currently investing out of Lightspeed XI, a $700 million fund and Select II, a $500 million fund.
Video Lightspeed Venture Partners
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. As of 2012 the firm had over $3 billion in committed capital.
In March, 2016 the company raised two new funds totaling in $1.2 billion.
Snapchat raised $485,000 in its seed round and an undisclosed amount of bridge funding from Lightspeed Ventures in 2012. Beyond the two Snap founders, the two biggest shareholders for the planned early 2017 Snap IPO were Benchmark and Lightspeed Venture Partners, both prior Snap investors and venture-capital firms from Silicon Valley. They held a combined stake of about 20%.
Maps Lightspeed Venture Partners
Significant investments
Summer Fellowship Program
Every year, Lightspeed offers summer fellowships to support entrepreneurship and innovation by engineering and computer science students. Weekly speakers and angel investors are brought in as guest speakers, and on the start-up experience. 2016 was the program's tenth year. Notable participants of Lightspeed's Fellowship program include Ben Silberman, Founder and CEO of Pinterest and Bobby Murphy, Founder and CTO of Snapchat.
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External links
Source of article : Wikipedia
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