Venture Capital · Profile from Venture Capital Research Companion
Bessemer Venture Partners
The oldest continuously operating venture investor in the United States, born out of the Phipps family's Carnegie Steel fortune, which went from a quiet family-office venture arm to one of the largest multi-stage firms in the world on the strength of its cloud-software "roadmaps", and which made a public virtue of its mistakes with the industry's best-known Anti-Portfolio.
At a glance
- Founded
- Roots in 1911 (Bessemer Trust / Bessemer Securities, founded by Henry Phipps Jr.); venture investing from the 1960s–70s; operated as Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) from the early 1980s (verify exact date)
- Founders
- Henry Phipps Jr. (family capital); the modern venture practice was built by Bessemer Securities' investment professionals (e.g. Neill Brownstein, Bill Burgin, Rob Buescher and others in the 1970s–90s)
- Headquarters
- San Francisco / Menlo Park and New York (historically Larchmont, NY); offices in Boston, Israel (Herzliya), India (Bangalore), London and others
- Ownership / structure
- Private partnership; Bessemer Securities (Phipps family) remains the parent and anchor LP. Outside institutional LPs from BVP VII (2007) onward
- Leadership (2026)
- No single CEO; a partnership run by an executive group. Long-serving partners include Byron Deeter, Jeremy Levine, David Cowan, Kent Bennett, Mary D'Onofrio, Talia Goldberg, Elliott Robinson, Alex Ferrara, Amit Karp and Adam Fisher (Israel) (roster verify)
- AUM / capital raised
- ~$20bn AUM (firm, 2022); BVP XII $3.85bn + BVP Forge I $780m (2022); India Fund II $350m (2025)
- Stage focus
- Multi-stage: seed through growth (Century funds) plus growth buyouts (BVP Forge); sector teams in cloud/SaaS, consumer, fintech, healthcare, cybersecurity, deep tech/space, AI
- Signature investments
- Skype, Yelp, LinkedIn, Wix, Twilio, Shopify, Pinterest, Toast, ServiceTitan, Rocket Lab, Canva, Fiverr, LifeLock; failures/instructive: Blue Apron. Anti-Portfolio: Apple, Google, eBay, Facebook, FedEx, Atlassian, Tesla
10 deals and moves analysed
Each one gets a full strategy file in the companion: context, the decision, the financing, what happened, and the lesson.
2004
Skype
Venture Round
2005
Yelp
Series A
2007
Wix
Early Venture Round
2010
Shopify
Series A
2010
Twilio
Series B
2011
Pinterest
Series A
2013
Blue Apron
Series A
2015
Rocket Lab
Series B
2015
ServiceTitan
Series A
2015
Toast
Series B