Bessemer Venture Partners
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Last reviewed
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Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) is an American venture capital firm and one of the oldest in the United States, tracing its lineage to the family office of steel magnate Henry Phipps Jr. and the founding of Bessemer Trust in 1911. Headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Boston, London, Tel Aviv, and Bangalore, the firm has backed more than 145 companies through to a public listing over its history, with a particular reputation for cloud and software-as-a-service investing. Notable holdings have included LinkedIn, Shopify, Twilio, Pinterest, and Yelp. Bessemer is also widely known for its self-deprecating "Anti-Portfolio," a public list of celebrated companies it declined to fund, and for its annual State of the Cloud research and the Cloud 100 ranking. As of 2025 the firm reported roughly $19 billion to $20 billion of assets under management and had expanded aggressively into artificial intelligence, deploying more than $1 billion into AI-native startups since 2023 and leading rounds such as legal-AI company EvenUp's $150 million Series E in October 2025.
The firm's origins lie with Henry Phipps Jr., a co-founder of Carnegie Steel alongside Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. After Carnegie Steel was sold in 1901 to form U.S. Steel, Phipps established Bessemer Trust in New York in 1911 to manage his family's wealth, and spun out a separate entity, Bessemer Securities, with roughly $20 million in assets to invest across venture deals, public securities, and real estate. The name comes not from Phipps himself but from the Bessemer process, the high-volume steelmaking method that Carnegie, Phipps, and Frick had commercialized in the 1890s.
For decades the venture activity remained the Phipps family's own capital. In 1974, Bessemer Trust began accepting outside clients, while Bessemer Securities kept managing only family money, which left it free to take on riskier private technology and medical bets. In 1975 the firm opened a Silicon Valley office and the high-growth investment arm adopted the name Bessemer Venture Partners. The 1970s brought heavy losses on real estate, but the venture franchise endured; by 1986 Bessemer Securities held about $950 million in assets. The venture operation later spun out fully as BVP, with Bessemer Securities remaining the parent. BVP began investing internationally around 2000, opening efforts in India, Israel, Latin America, and Europe. It did not raise capital from outside limited partners until 2007, when it closed Bessemer Venture Partners VII as its first fund to take third-party money. The firm and Bessemer Trust are today separate businesses.
Bessemer's modern identity is closely tied to cloud computing. Partner David Cowan, who joined in 1992, launched the firm's practices in cloud, cybersecurity, consumer internet, gaming, space, and quantum computing, and co-founded VeriSign inside Bessemer's offices in 1995, serving as its initial chairman before its 1998 IPO. Partner Byron Deeter built much of the SaaS portfolio. In 2010 Deeter led a roughly $12 million investment in Twilio at about a $52 million post-money valuation and took a board seat; by Twilio's 2016 IPO, Bessemer was its largest shareholder, owning about 28.5 percent of the company. Bessemer was also the biggest shareholder in Shopify heading into its 2015 IPO. Deeter chaired the National Venture Capital Association board for the 2024-2025 term.
Since 2016 the firm has published the annual State of the Cloud report, authored by its investment team and used widely as a benchmark for SaaS metrics and trends. Bessemer also co-produces the Cloud 100 with Forbes and Salesforce Ventures, an annual ranking of the top private cloud companies. The 2024 Cloud 100 reached an aggregate value of about $820 billion, up roughly 25 percent year over year, and the 2025 list grew to about $1.117 trillion, a 36 percent jump, with AI companies accounting for roughly $464 billion of that value. The firm also maintains the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index.
Bessemer has raised twelve numbered flagship venture funds over its history, growing them substantially in the cloud era. BVP X closed at $1.85 billion in October 2018. BVP XI closed at $2.475 billion in February 2021, alongside other vehicles that brought the total to about $3.3 billion across two funds. In September 2022 the firm closed BVP XII at $3.85 billion, then its largest fund and among the largest individual U.S. venture funds ever raised, targeting early-stage companies across enterprise, deep tech, fintech, consumer, and healthcare. At the same time it closed $780 million for BVP Forge, its first growth-buyout fund for software and technology-enabled-services businesses, having stood up a dedicated private equity team in 2021.
At the time of the 2022 fundraise the firm reported over $20 billion in assets under management; by 2025 it described its scale as roughly $19 billion, a figure that reflects market and portfolio valuations. In March 2025 Bessemer closed its second dedicated India fund at $350 million, led by partners Vishal Gupta and Anant Vidur Puri, to back early-stage AI-enabled services, SaaS, fintech, digital health, consumer, and cybersecurity startups. Industry trackers ranked Bessemer as the third-largest U.S. venture firm by five-year fundraising in 2024.
Among Bessemer's best-known artifacts is its "Anti-Portfolio," a page on the firm's website that catalogs companies it passed on that went on to enormous success, presented as a candid lesson in the difficulty of venture investing. The list spans decades and includes Apple, Google, Facebook, eBay, FedEx, Intel, Intuit, PayPal, Tesla, Airbnb, Atlassian, Snapchat, Zoom, Okta, Kayak, and Instacart, among others.
The entries are written with deliberate humor at the firm's own expense. On Apple, an investor called a pre-IPO stake at a $60 million valuation "outrageously expensive." On Google, an early partner, declining to even meet the founders working out of a friend's garage, reportedly asked, "How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?" On eBay the recorded reaction was, "Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You've GOT to be kidding." The firm notes it passed on FedEx seven times, and on Facebook advised an early figure to "move on, it's over," likening it to Friendster. The Anti-Portfolio has become a widely cited piece of venture-capital culture and a model of public candor about missed deals.
Bessemer has framed AI as the defining platform shift of the 2020s, publishing an annual State of AI report and roadmaps on AI infrastructure and applications, and segmenting its fastest-scaling AI companies into categories it calls "Supernovas." Since making its first dedicated AI commitments in 2023, the firm says it has deployed more than $1 billion into AI-native startups. Its disclosed AI holdings include Anthropic, the translation company DeepL, design platform Canva, conversational search engine Perplexity, healthcare-documentation company Abridge, customer-service AI vendors Ada and Fin by Intercom, content-generation company Jasper, audit-and-advisory tool Fieldguide, and legal-AI company EvenUp.
The firm's highest-profile AI deal to date is EvenUp, a startup applying AI to personal-injury legal work. On October 7, 2025, Bessemer led EvenUp's $150 million Series E at a valuation above $2 billion, with participation from B Capital, SignalFire, Lightspeed, Adams Street, HarbourVest, Broadlight Capital, and REV, the venture arm of RELX. The round brought EvenUp's total funding to about $385 million; the company said its platform had been used on more than 200,000 cases across over 2,000 U.S. law firms. Bessemer's healthcare team has also tracked and backed a wave of clinical-AI mega-rounds, with Abridge among the companies whose valuations have risen fastest.
| Company | Round / Year | Bessemer role |
|---|---|---|
| EvenUp | $150M Series E, October 2025 | Lead investor |
| Anthropic | Disclosed AI holding | Investor |
| Perplexity | Disclosed AI holding | Investor |
| Abridge | Late-stage clinical AI | Investor |
| DeepL | Disclosed AI holding | Investor |
| Canva | Disclosed AI holding | Investor |
| Jasper | AI content platform | Investor |
| Ada | Customer-service AI | Investor |
Bessemer's senior investors include Byron Deeter, known for cloud and SaaS, and Jeremy Levine, a consumer-internet specialist in the New York office whose early-stage bets that became billion-dollar public companies include LinkedIn, Mindbody, Pinterest, Shopify, and Yelp. David Cowan leads much of the firm's cybersecurity, frontier, and deep-tech work, and Mary D'Onofrio is among the partners focused on cloud and growth-stage software.
Across its history Bessemer has participated in more than 145 IPOs, including Skype, Yelp, LinkedIn, Shopify, Twilio, SendGrid, DocuSign, Wix, Mindbody, and LifeLock. LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for about $26.2 billion in 2016. More recent liquidity events in the firm's broader portfolio include the 2025 public listings of ticket marketplace StubHub and Hinge Health, and the acquisition of payments company Melio by Xero. The firm reports dozens of unicorns and a smaller set of decacorn outcomes among its current holdings, alongside an India franchise whose companies include BigBasket, Swiggy, and Urban Company. Bessemer competes for late-stage and AI deals with firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and remains active across cloud, AI agents, cybersecurity, healthcare, and frontier technology.