American venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners has raised $1.8 Bn to invest in start-ups in various sectors, including digital currency, Reuters reported. The firm is planning to expand in Southeast Asia, investing in companies active in fields from cryptocurrency and biotechnology to the cosmetics industry.
Lightspeed plans to invest in a company repeatedly over the course of several years in order to keep a significant ownership interest. The VC announced that $1.05 Bn of the new funding will be allocated to more mature companies.
Lightspeed’s previous funds have returned $2.7 Bn to investors since the beginning of 2017. According to Reuters, companies supported by Lightspeed have conducted 17 initial public offerings during the last five years. Lightspeed Venture Partners has traditionally been an early-stage investment firm. In addition to being the first institutional investor in now publicly traded Snap, the company wrote early checks to MuleSoft, which had a successful IPO in 2018; in StitchFix, which had an IPO in 2018, and in AppDynamics, which sold to Cisco for $3.7 Bn last year. It also invested in Nimble Storage, which sold to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for just north of $1 Bn in cash last March and recently another of its portfolio companies, Zscaler, also staged a successful IPO. In 2014 the firm participated in a $30.5 M funding round in Blockchain.com and Blockchain.info.
