Altos Ventures, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm behind Roblox, Coupang, PandaDoc, Quizlet and more, has secured $500 million in its latest fund, according to an SEC filing. The company has been around for nearly 30 years and this is its largest fund to date.
Altos Ventures declined to comment on the filing or the new fund.
The multi-stage VC firm manages more than 15 funds across three vehicles, according to PitchBook. These include the Altos Ventures and Altos Hybrid funds, which invest in US and global companies, as well as the Altos Korea Opportunistic Fund, which targets Korean startups. Altos Ventures manages over $7 billion in assets.
Altos Ventures specializes in enterprise and consumer software, with a focus on SaaS, consumer, and mobile. The company is proud to be the “first institutional investor in founder-led, high-growth companies.”
The new fund is notable because it shows that established companies continue to raise large sums of money even as other parts of the venture market cool. For example, funding has become more difficult for emerging fund managers, many late-stage startups are struggling to raise growth capital, and valuations are generally weak (especially if the company is not an AI company). ), the IPO market is depressed. It's been in decline for years.
In contrast to some venture capital firms that have scaled to multi-billion-dollar funding over the past decade, Altos has taken a more restrained approach, consistently increasing its funding caps every few years. and has been kept at less than $1 billion. This is in line with Benchmark, which has remained conservative, raising $425 million in funding earlier this year and an additional $170 million in partner-only funding.
For these companies, maintaining a strategy focused on early-stage investments in a select number of early-stage startups, and in the case of Altos, late-stage bets, is a good way to chase FOMO trades during the ZIRP period. It has proven to be more effective than raising billions of dollars. And the current AI investment boom.
Data from Cambridge Associates, which builds and manages investment portfolios for institutional investors, supports this trend. Historically, smaller funds have delivered higher returns. Reflecting this, CRV, a veteran venture firm with more than a half-century of history, recently withdrew more than half of its $500 million late-stage funding, citing soaring valuations for mature startups. I returned it.
Altos Ventures' backers seem satisfied with its investment strategy. The 28-year-old firm claims to be the original lead investor in more than 50 companies, with more than a dozen portfolio companies going public or being acquired by publicly traded companies. According to PitchBook data, Altos has helped nearly 250 companies to date.