Venture Capital · Profile from Venture Capital Research Companion
Lightspeed Venture Partners
The Menlo Park enterprise-infrastructure shop born out of a Wall Street firm's venture arm that bet its first fund at the top of the 2000 bubble, survived it, and then rebuilt itself into a multi-stage, multi-region platform — best known for the $485k Snapchat seed check, a long run of infrastructure wins (AppDynamics, Nutanix, MuleSoft, Rubrik, Netskope) and, in the 2020s, lead positions in frontier AI (Mistral, Anthropic).
At a glance
- Founded
- 2000, Menlo Park, California (team spun out of Weiss, Peck & Greer's venture practice)
- Founders
- Barry Eggers, Ravi Mhatre, Peter Nieh, Christopher Schaepe
- Headquarters
- Menlo Park, CA; offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Bengaluru, New Delhi/Gurugram, Mumbai, Singapore; affiliated, separately managed China funds (Lightspeed China Partners, Shanghai/Beijing)
- Ownership / structure
- Private partnership; general partners own the management company. Reported to have registered as an RIA in the mid-2020s to widen its permissible investments (secondaries, public stock, crypto) (verify)
- Leadership (2026)
- Ravi Mhatre (co-founder, senior managing partner) with a broad partnership including Arif Janmohamed, Jeremy Liew, Mercedes Bent, Gaurav Gupta, Bucky Moore, Guru Chahal, Justin Overdorff (growth), Antoine Moyroud and Paul Murphy (Europe), Bejul Somaia, Dev Khare and Hemant Mohapatra (India), Yoni Cheifetz (Israel). Titles change frequently; verify individual roles
- AUM / capital raised
- ~$25bn+ raised cumulatively by 2023; firm and press cite ~$35bn+ AUM before the December 2025 raise, which added >$9bn across six vehicles (Wikipedia infobox shows ~$50bn; treat as reported)
- Stage focus
- Seed through growth; core sectors enterprise/infrastructure, security, fintech, consumer, health; AI-native companies the dominant 2023–26 theme
- Signature investments
- Wins: Snap, AppDynamics, Nutanix, MuleSoft, Nicira, Nest, Riverbed, Affirm, Rubrik, Netskope, Forty Seven, Navan, Mistral AI, Anthropic, Glean, Grafana; India: OYO, Udaan, ShareChat. Disappointments: the 2000 vintage fund; post-IPO declines (Snap, Nutanix, Stitch Fix); India markdowns after the 2021 peak
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.
2007
MuleSoft
Series B
2008
AppDynamics
Series A
2010
Nutanix
Series A
2012
Netskope
Series A
2012
Snapchat
Seed
2014
OYO
Seed
2014
Rubrik
Series A
2015
Navan
Seed
2023
Mistral AI
Seed
2025
Anthropic
Series E