Venture Capital · Profile from Venture Capital Research Companion
Institutional Venture Partners (IVP)
The Menlo Park firm that began as one of Silicon Valley's original early-stage partnerships (Seagate, LSI Logic, Netflix, TiVo), handed its early-stage franchise to Redpoint in 1999, and reinvented itself as the leading focused "later-stage venture" firm, writing concentrated growth checks into category winners such as Twitter, Snap, Dropbox, Coinbase, HashiCorp and Perplexity.
At a glance
- Founded
- 1980 as IVP (predecessor Institutional Venture Associates, 1974)
- Founders
- Reid W. Dennis (with partners from IVA; Burton McMurtry co-founded IVA and left to form Technology Venture Investors)
- Headquarters
- Menlo Park, CA; San Francisco office; London office (opened August 2023)
- Ownership / structure
- Private partnership; numbered funds (IVP I–XVIII); no CEO or managing partner, with a new GP slate for each fund
- Leadership (2026)
- General partners including Jules Maltz, Somesh Dash, Eric Liaw, Steve Harrick, Dennis Phelps and Tom Loverro (fund-by-fund GP slate; verify current roster)
- AUM / capital raised
- ~$7bn+ under management (reported); IVP XVIII ~$1.6bn (2024)
- Stage focus
- Later-stage venture and growth equity (typically Series C–pre-IPO) in software, consumer internet, fintech, infrastructure and AI; minority stakes
- Signature investments
- Seagate, LSI Logic, Netflix, TiVo, Juniper, MySQL, Twitter, Dropbox, Snap, Supercell, Slack, Coinbase, CrowdStrike, Datadog, Rubrik, HashiCorp, Klarna, Wise, Discord, Perplexity; misses and failures: Hopin (2020 lead, later wound down), HashiCorp's sale to IBM below its IPO price
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.
1997
TiVo
Founding Round
2009
Twitter
Series C
2011
Dropbox
Growth Round
2013
Snap
Series B
2013
Supercell
Growth Round
2017
Coinbase
Series D
2017
Rubrik
Series D
2018
HashiCorp
Series D
2020
Hopin
Series B
2024
Perplexity
Series B