Meritech closes $425 million late-stage fund

Fourth fund for backer of Facebook, Zipcar, and several other classic and upcoming companies

Late-stage venture capital firm Meritech Capital Partners (MCP) announced Wednesday that it has closed $425 million for its fourth late-stage fund.

The firm’s cumulative capital under management now totals $2.6 billion. MCP IV succeeds MCP III, a $400 million fund started in 2006.

Targeting Internet and Digital Media, Communications and Wireless, Enterprise IT and Medical Devices, MCP IV will make investments ranging in size from $10 to $20 million. Based on Meritech’s past investments, it appears that the firm has little preference in regard to a startup’s location.

Here are a few of the last Meritech-funded startup rounds we’ve covered in the past months:

• December 2010: Car rental service Zipcar (Cambridge, Mass.) raised a $21 million Series G round led by Meritech, which contributed $20 million. Pinnacle Ventures provided the rest. Earlier this month, the startup raised $174 million in its IPO.
• February 2011: Wonga (UK), a service that issues small short-term loans online, raised £73 million ($117 million) in an equity round led by Oak Investment Partners, with participation from Meritech and Wellcome Trust.
• February 2011: Box.net (Palo Alto, Calif.), provider of cloud storage for the enterprise, raised a $48 million Series D round led by Meritech, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Emergence Capital Partners and prior investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners.

Other recent investments include Cloudera, Cyan and Tableau. As far as companies that have already seen great success, Meritech’s portfolio boasts Cornerstone OnDemand, Facebook, Fortinet, Intralase, Netezza, Netsuite, Riverbed and Salesforce.

“We see no shortage of investment opportunities given the innovation that is taking place in mobile, virtualization, cloud computing, the social-enabled Internet and data management and analytics,” said George Bischof, managing director at Meritech, in a prepared statement. “If anything, there are a record number of attractive late-stage companies today.”

Meritech currently has four managing directors, but is reported to be announcing a new partner in the next week or so.