Whereas many top-tier enterprise corporations hold elevating massively bigger funds, Greylock Ventures, one of many oldest and most prestigious enterprise corporations in Silicon Valley, is deliberately resisting the pattern of ballooning fund sizes.
On Tuesday, the 61-year-old agency introduced that it had raised a $1.5 billion 18th fund. The quantity is 50% increased than its earlier $1 billion car from 2023 and roughly matches the capital the agency raised throughout seed and flagship funds through the pandemic. Nonetheless, Greylock associate Saam Motamedi instructed TechCrunch that Greylock may have simply raised a “a number of” of that determine, suggesting the partnership determined restraint was the higher path at a time when fund sizes throughout the trade hold climbing.
“Our mission is to be an important associate to an important entrepreneurs,” Motamedi mentioned. The agency prides itself on introducing its portfolio corporations to high engineers and potential prospects, because it did for Baseten, an AI infrastructure startup that’s now valued at $13 billion, after first investing in its Collection A in 2022. However Motamedi mentioned Greylock can supply that degree of help solely by maintaining the variety of corporations it backs small.
The agency’s 10 companions make just one or two new investments every yearly, a tempo Motamedi mentioned will lead to roughly 25 portfolio corporations from this fund.
Like its predecessors, the brand new fund will focus totally on incubating corporations from the earliest phases and main seed and Collection A rounds. That is the place Greylock has constructed its fame; the agency has a robust monitor document of beginning corporations from scratch, most notably safety large Palo Alto Networks, which launched inside Greylock’s places of work 21 years in the past, and the e-mail safety startup Irregular, which Greylock incubated in 2018 and that was final valued at $5.1 billion.
Even so, Greylock doesn’t stick strictly to early-stage offers. It’ll additionally again high-potential, later-stage corporations even when it “missed them early on,” Motamedi mentioned. The agency’s seventeenth fund included three such growth-stage bets: Anthropic, Revolut, and Wiz.
The agency made its first funding into Anthropic when the AI firm raised its Collection F at a $183 billion valuation. “It’s the biggest funding within the agency’s historical past,” Motamedi mentioned.
Motamedi estimates that roughly 15% of the brand new fund might be deployed into later-stage startups, however he maintains that Greylock stays basically an early-stage investor.
As proof, Motamedi mentioned that when the companions meet each Monday to evaluate their funding pipeline, the agenda consists primarily of individuals’s names reasonably than firm names.
“We’re attending to know folks even earlier than they begin an organization. It’s actually a guess on the individual,” he mentioned. “Usually the corporate doesn’t even exist.’”
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