Kleiner Perkins
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Kleiner Perkins is an American venture capital firm, founded in 1972 and based on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, that in March 2026 raised $3.5 billion across two new funds aimed almost entirely at artificial intelligence, completing a turnaround from one of the industry's most storied names into an AI-focused early-stage investor.[1][3][6] Long known as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), the firm helped define the modern venture model and over five decades backed foundational technology and life sciences companies including Genentech, Tandem Computers, Amazon, Google, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and America Online. After a difficult stretch in the 2010s tied to a large bet on clean technology and the departure of its growth practice, the firm rebranded simply as Kleiner Perkins and rebooted around an early-stage strategy led by partners Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman, with longtime partner John Doerr moving to chairman.[2] In the generative AI era it has concentrated heavily on AI, backing companies such as Anthropic, Harvey, Together AI, Glean, Ambience Healthcare, and OpenEvidence, and partner Mamoon Hamid has said that more than 80 percent of the pitches the firm hears now involve AI.[10]
Thomas Perkins, an early Hewlett-Packard executive, and Eugene Kleiner, a founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, formed the firm in the summer of 1972 and set up shop on Sand Hill Road with a fund of $8 million, having fallen short of a $10 million target.[1] That debut fund, anchored by investments in Tandem Computers and Genentech, averaged roughly 41.5 percent compounded return over its first decade, an early demonstration that a small, hands-on partnership could generate outsized returns by building companies from the ground up.[1] The partnership added Frank J. Caufield and Brook Byers, with Byers joining in 1977, and the name changed to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to reflect the four-person leadership.[1]
Tandem Computers, a fault-tolerant computing company that Perkins helped incubate inside the firm, became a cornerstone success. Kleiner Perkins committed about $1.6 million by 1975, and Tandem went public in 1977.[1] The firm's hands-on, company-building posture, in which partners helped recruit executives and shape strategy rather than simply writing checks, became a template that later spread across the industry.
Kleiner Perkins was the original venture investor in Genentech in 1976, helping to launch the biotechnology industry.[20] Founders Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson shook hands on the deal with Tom Perkins, who served as chairman of Genentech's board from 1976 until 1990; the company's 1980 IPO valued it at about $300 million, and Roche eventually acquired it in 2009 for roughly $47 billion.[20][1] The bet helped establish that venture capital could create entirely new industries, not just fund incremental products.
The firm's reputation grew through the personal-computing and internet booms. It invested roughly $5 million in Netscape in 1994, taking a large stake ahead of the company's landmark 1995 IPO.[1] In 1996 it backed Amazon, an investment that ultimately returned well over $1 billion.[1] Its most celebrated deal came in 1999, when partner John Doerr wrote a check of about $11.8 million for roughly 12 percent of Google, as part of a $25 million round that Kleiner co-led with Sequoia Capital on similar terms.[15] Doerr joined Google's board, mentored founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and introduced the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) goal-setting framework he had learned at Intel.[15] Other portfolio companies from this era included Sun Microsystems, America Online, Electronic Arts, Intuit, and Compaq. By the mid-1990s the firm had funded hundreds of companies, and its partners, especially Doerr, became among the most influential figures in Silicon Valley.
In the second half of the 2000s the firm made a large strategic bet on clean technology, or greentech. It earmarked $100 million for the sector in 2006, doubled that commitment to $200 million in 2008, and launched a $500 million Green Growth Fund the same year.[13] The clean-tech portfolio grew to roughly 88 companies by 2013.[13] The bet proved costly. Electric-vehicle maker Fisker Automotive became one of the largest venture losses on record. Solar companies fared poorly as well: MiaSole raised close to $500 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins before being sold in 2013 for about $30 million, and Beamreach Solar (formerly Solexel) raised more than $250 million before going bankrupt in 2017.[13] Critics argued the firm's focus on capital-intensive cleantech caused it to miss the early consumer-internet wave, including companies such as Facebook and Twitter, that drove returns for rivals.[13] Doerr stepped back from active investing for future funds around 2016 and later donated more than $1.1 billion to establish a climate school at Stanford, while the firm itself largely sat out the later cleantech resurgence.[14]
In 2010 the firm recruited Mary Meeker, the former Morgan Stanley analyst known as the "Queen of the Internet," to build a digital growth practice focused on later-stage technology companies. Her annual Internet Trends report became one of the most widely read documents in the industry, and her practice invested in companies including Square, Snap, Spotify, and Slack.[11] Around the same time the firm expanded beyond its early-stage roots, launching growth funds and themed vehicles such as the $250 million sFund for social startups (2010) and the iFund for iPhone applications, which started at $100 million in 2008 and doubled to $200 million in 2009.
The firm also weathered a high-profile gender-discrimination lawsuit filed by former partner Ellen Pao in 2012; a jury found in the firm's favor in March 2015.[1] As the partnership reorganized, tensions emerged between the legacy growth practice and the newer early-stage leadership. In September 2018, Meeker left to found her own firm, Bond, taking the entire growth team with her, including Mood Rowghani, Noah Knauf, and Juliet de Baubigny.[11] Bond raised about $1.25 billion for its debut fund in 2019.[12] Doerr, who had been the public face of the firm for decades, transitioned to the role of chairman, stepping back from day-to-day investing while continuing to help close marquee deals.
The modern Kleiner Perkins dates to the summer of 2017, when Mamoon Hamid joined from Social Capital, the firm he had co-founded after earlier success at U.S. Venture Partners. Ilya Fushman, previously head of product and business at Dropbox and a partner at Index Ventures, joined in 2018. The two had known each other since childhood in Frankfurt, Germany.[2] With Meeker's growth team gone, Hamid argued that the firm should return to its early-stage origins, where it had built its reputation, rather than compete as a late-stage crossover investor.[2]
Beginning in January 2019, the firm dropped the Caufield and Byers names from its branding, returning to the simpler Kleiner Perkins, and reset its strategy around concentrated, early-stage bets led by a smaller partnership.[2] The partners worked to make decisions faster, in some cases within days rather than weeks, after the firm had been criticized as slow and less nimble than competitors. The reboot produced a strong run of results. The firm led Figma's $25 million Series B in 2018 and saw profits exceeding $1.4 billion when Figma went public in July 2025 at about a $13.5 billion market capitalization, a return the firm has described as roughly 90 times its investment.[2] It was an early lead investor in Brex, later acquired by Capital One for about $5.15 billion, and it counted exits or returns from companies including Slack, UiPath, Robinhood, Loom, and Looker.[2] By the mid-2020s the firm reported roughly $13 billion in returns to limited partners since 2018.[2]
After the reboot the firm settled into a cadence of numbered early-stage funds alongside separate growth vehicles. KP18 was announced in January 2019. KP19, a $700 million early-stage fund focused on enterprise, consumer, hardtech, fintech, and healthcare, was announced in March 2020.[9] Subsequent funds included KP20 and a series of Select growth funds for high-inflection follow-on investments.
In 2024 the firm raised just over $2 billion across two funds: KP21, an $825 million early-stage fund and its largest flagship vehicle to that point, and KP Select III, a $1.2 billion growth fund, ranking among the largest U.S. venture raises that year.[7][8] On March 24, 2026, the firm announced its largest raise yet: $3.5 billion in total, split between KP22, a $1 billion early-stage fund, and KP Select IV, a $2.5 billion growth fund.[3][5][6] The firm framed the funds around an "AI super-cycle," citing professional services, healthcare, autonomy, security, financial services, productivity, and the physical economy as priority areas, and wrote that "The AI super-cycle is one of the most important company-building moments in our lifetimes, and we are still in the early innings."[4] Across the Hamid and Fushman era the firm has raised well over $6 billion in fresh capital.
| Fund | Year | Size | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| KP19 | 2020 | $700M | Early-stage |
| KP21 | 2024 | $825M | Early-stage |
| KP Select III | 2024 | $1.2B | Growth |
| KP22 | 2026 | $1B | Early-stage |
| KP Select IV | 2026 | $2.5B | Growth |
Kleiner Perkins has positioned itself across multiple layers of the generative AI stack. Mamoon Hamid has said that by early 2024 more than 80 percent of the pitches the firm heard involved AI in some form, adding: "To be fair, if you were building a company in 1996 and you didn't mention the internet, you'd be out of your mind, right? In the same vein, not mentioning AI or utilizing it would be a missed opportunity."[10] Its bets span foundation models and safety, where it is an investor in Anthropic and Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence; infrastructure, where it led the $102.5 million Series A of Together AI; and a deep set of vertical applications and AI agents.[3][16]
In legal AI it co-led the $80 million Series B of Harvey in December 2023 alongside Elad Gil, at a roughly $715 million valuation and with participation from the OpenAI Startup Fund and Sequoia Capital.[17] In healthcare it co-led Ambience Healthcare's seed round in 2020 and its $70 million Series B in 2024, and it co-led OpenEvidence's $210 million Series B in July 2025 with Google Ventures at a $3.5 billion valuation, a deal in which chairman John Doerr was personally involved; OpenEvidence says it is used by more than 40 percent of U.S. physicians.[18][19] It backed enterprise search company Glean from Series A through Series D, autonomy-software company Applied Intuition, security company Chainguard, and Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev's research startup Harmonic.[3] The firm has described its AI thesis as conviction-led and concentrated, with the larger growth funds enabling it to keep investing in winners such as Harvey and OpenEvidence as they scale.[3]
Kleiner Perkins competes for the same AI deals as rivals such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and it frequently invests alongside them: Sequoia co-led the Google round in 1999 and participated in Harvey's Series B, while a16z has emerged as one of the most aggressive AI investors of the 2020s.[15][17] Where a16z built a large multi-strategy platform with tens of billions of dollars under management, Kleiner under Hamid and Fushman deliberately reset toward a smaller, more concentrated early-stage partnership, a contrast the firm has framed as a deliberate choice to make faster, higher-conviction bets rather than to maximize assets under management.[2]
John Doerr, who joined in 1980, is the firm's chairman and one of the most prominent venture capitalists of his generation, known for early bets on Sun, Amazon, and Google and for popularizing OKRs.[15] Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman lead the current partnership and drove the reboot.[2] Past partners include Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems who left to start Khosla Ventures; Bill Joy, another Sun co-founder; Mary Meeker, who built and then spun out the growth practice as Bond; and Brook Byers, who led the firm's pioneering life sciences practice. Founders Eugene Kleiner (1923 to 2003), Tom Perkins (1932 to 2016), and Frank Caufield (1939 to 2019) have all died.[1] The firm at various points also brought in figures such as Colin Powell and former Vice President Al Gore as partners. Bucky Moore, who led the Together AI investment and took a board seat, was a longtime infrastructure partner before leaving for Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2025.[16]
| Company | Round / Year | Kleiner Perkins role |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Multiple rounds | Investor in foundation-model and AI-safety company |
| Together AI | Series A, November 2023 ($102.5M) | Led round; Bucky Moore joined board |
| Harvey | Series B, December 2023 ($80M) | Co-led with Elad Gil at ~$715M valuation |
| Ambience Healthcare | Seed 2020; Series B 2024 ($70M) | Co-led seed; co-led Series B with OpenAI Startup Fund |
| OpenEvidence | Series B, July 2025 ($210M) | Co-led with GV at $3.5B valuation; John Doerr involved |
| Glean | Series A through Series D | Multi-stage backer |
| Applied Intuition | Growth-stage | Investor in autonomy software |
| Chainguard | Growth-stage | Investor in software supply-chain security |
| Safe Superintelligence | Early backer | Investor in Ilya Sutskever's lab |
| Harmonic | Early-stage | Investor in Vlad Tenev's AI research startup |