The old Silicon Valley windfall Greylock announced the completion of the 18th fund-raiser, which was $1.5 billion. Instead of continuing to scale up fund-raising, the company chose to control the size of the fund in order to maintain a lower number of projects and a deeper participation.
Fund size is 50% higher than the previous one.
This new fund, which is higher than the $1 billion raised by Greylock in 2023, is also close to the level of its combined seed fund and main fund raised during the epidemic. Sam Motamedi, a Greylock partner, said to TechCrunch that the company could have raised more money, but ultimately decided to exercise restraint.
He stated that the goal of Greylock was to be the most important partner of entrepreneurs, not simply to expand the pool. Along these lines, the larger the fund, the larger it often implies more projects to be covered and diluting partner input to individual projects.
Only one or two new projects per partner per year
Greylock currently has 10 partners. According to Motamedi, each partner usually adds only 1 to 2 new investments per year, so the fund eventually corresponds to a portfolio of about 25 companies.
Greylock will continue to focus on the earliest stages, mainly covering incubation projects, seed wheels and A lead. This is also its long-standing area of reputation. It was reported that Palo Alto Networks, a network security company, had hatched 21 years ago from the Greylock office and that the mail security company Abnormal had been involved in hatching by Greylock in 2018, the latest estimate being $5.1 billion.
About 15% will be invested in high-growth companies later.
While the main line is still an early investment, Greylock may reserve funds for a few later companies. Motamedi expects that about 15 per cent of the new fund will be invested in late start-up companies, provided they have high growth potential, even if Greylock did not enter early.
In the previous fund, such later projects included Anthropic, Revolut and Wiz. Of these, Greylock invested the company for the first time in the Anthropic F round of financing. According to the report, this was also the largest investment in Greylock ' s history. At that time, Anthropic ' s financing was valued at $183.0 billion.
Motamedi also indicated that, when Greylock discussed investment projects on Monday, the agenda was more about the name of the founder than the name of the company. This reflects a continued preference for “first-to-first-to-first-to-first-to-project” investment approach, which even begins to reach out to entrepreneurs before they are formally incorporated.