Jeff Holling's Insight Partners is to New York venture capitalists what Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia are to Silicon Valley. And this position was solidified with Insight's recent financial results.
As expected, Insight Partners announced on Thursday that it had closed another large flagship fund known as Fund XIII and a second opportunity fund, totaling $12.5 billion in new capital. Opportunity funds are typically funds set aside to be reinvested when existing portfolio companies raise new rounds.
In September, it was rumored that he was setting up a fund worth more than $10 billion. Insight clearly achieved that goal, and then some. The fund currently has $90 billion in assets under management.
An Insight spokesperson declined to say how many billions of dollars are in each new fund, but some of the money will also be used in what the company calls a “dedicated buyout co-investment fund.” It is being said. A spokesperson said the funds will be used for acquisition software investments, an established area for the 30-year-old company.
The hike signals that Insight has no intention of giving up the top spot to Thrive, a leading New York venture capital firm. In 2024, Josh Kushner's Thrive led and co-led a number of big deals, from OpenAI's $6.6 billion round to Anysphere's $100 million Series B, maker of the AI coding assistant Cursor. .
Insight is not a compromise. For example, the VC firm co-led Databricks' record $10 billion funding deal alongside Thrive in December. To do so, the company leveraged money from the Partners Public Equities Fund, a fund set up to buy publicly traded stocks. This new capital will help it pursue more deals, and perhaps even lead them.
Interestingly, in a year where a locked IPO market meant delayed profits for many VCs, Insight said its portfolio companies fared well, posting more than $8 billion in exits in 2024, primarily through acquisitions. . These include $2.65 billion from Recorded Future to Mastercard, $1.9 billion from Own to Salesforce, $1.5 billion from WalkMe to SAP, and $1.2 billion from Jama Software to private equity.