Bessemer Venture Partners announced on Wednesday that it has raised $5.75 billion across two new funds to accelerate its investment across all parts of the AI stack. The firm, which has backed companies such as Anthropic, Cognition, Legora, Perplexity, Ramp, Shopify and Waymo, dedicated $1.75 billion for seed and early-stage investing and the remaining $4 billion for growth startups.
Bessemer has been well-known as a leading VC in the SaaS era, with a particular knack for picking enterprise winners, like Box, DocuSign, and Gainsight. Since 2022, it has invested in more than 260 AI-native companies. So far, the firm has invested $3 billion into AI-related startups, it says, including those focused on compute, infrastructure, foundation models, dev tools, app-layer startups, and agentic tech.
Now, Bessemer positions all things AI as the opportunity of a lifetime — a common sentiment, until the next big trendy tech revolution comes around, of course.
“AI-native companies are scaling faster than any category of technology we’ve backed before,” Bessemer Partner Byron Deeter said in the company’s funding announcement. VC firms also need to keep increasing their war chests, Deeter told Bloomberg, because companies staying private longer has become “a permanent structural shift.”
