Kleiner Perkins starts 50th year with $1.8B in two new funds

Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s legacy venture capital firms, is kicking off 2022 right by celebrating five decades in business and $1.8 billion in funds raised for two new funds — KP20 and Select2.

KP20 is an $800 million venture fund focused on early-stage investments in enterprise, consumer, hardtech, fintech and healthcare companies, while Select2 is a $1 billion fund — the most the firm has raised at once — that extends its core investment strategy to focus on high inflection investments across those same five areas.

Select2 follows the $750 million Kleiner Perkins Select fund the firm announced last April.

Partner Ilya Fushman told TechCrunch that the firm’s focus is the same today as it was when Kleiner Perkins started in 1972: “Venture is a non-scalable, boutique craft that requires incredibly dedicated practitioners with diverse and complementary backgrounds that span technology, operating and investing.”

With a history of being early investors in technology darlings, like Google, Amazon, Netscape and Genentech, Fushman said the investor team curated over the past four years is taking over the next generation of the firm, while the new funds will be able to back the next generation of iconic companies, he said.

Kleiner Perkins’ investor team. Image Credits: Kleiner Perkins

In addition to the funds, Kleiner Perkins promoted several team members as new partners: Annie Case, a consumer marketplaces and digital health expert, and Josh Coyne, who leads investments in business software.

Case told TechCrunch that within the digital health space, she is seeing more investment going into mental and behavioral health and alternative medicines, while on the consumer side, there is a lot happening in education technology, mainly due to school districts and parents adapting to the experience of teaching during the global pandemic. The firm is also spending more time looking at opportunities in crypto and web3.

As for raising $1.8 billion in one go, Fushman says Kleiner Perkins is adjusting to the current conditions where companies are not only growing bigger and faster, but also growing across sectors, technology and internationally. The scale of opportunity is bigger than ever before, and that is reflected in exit valuations and the number of companies that get started each year.

And having more fund capital at the firm’s disposal enables the company to deploy it into later rounds, or with a bigger check to get in, and still be able to provide a similar venture assistance Kleiner Perkins is known for in the early stage.

“The market overall for venture makes it an exciting time to grow beyond early-stage and provide a full spectrum of capital,” Fushman said. “As we help companies grow, if we see them hitting an inflection or we miss out on the Series A, we can do something from the Select fund.”