Scale Venture Partners raises $335M enterprise fund

With Box, DocuSign, and HubSpot in its portfolio, ScaleVP raises a new fund for enterprise software

Scale Venture Partners (ScaleVP) today announced that it has closed $335 million for its Scale Venture Partners V, L.P. from existing investors and several new partners.

The Foster City-based firm previously raised $300 million for its Scale Venture Partners IV fund in May 2013.

With the new fund, ScaleVP will stick to its primary focus area of enterprise software, especially those companies already seeing early traction with customers. Specifically, the firm says it will make investments of $5-25 million with its new fund, suggesting that it will focus on leading early-stage deals while also participating in later stage ones.

Trends the firm follows include big data, digital marketing, enterprise collaboration, and more.

Some well-known names from Scale Venture Partners’ portfolio include Box, DocuSign, and HubSpot. The firm’s most recent investments include participation in a $50 million round for open source software developer JFrog, a $25 million Series C round for data stream network PubNub, and a $40 million Series E round for DevOps automation company Chef.

“Since first investing in 2010, the Scale team has served as a strategic and energetic partner, always encouraging us to push the limits of what is possible in the realm of enterprise content management.” said Box CEO Aaron Levie in the press release for today’s announcement.

ScaleVP V could very well be one of the biggest VC funds raised this quarter.

Dow Jones just released its 4Q 2015 VentureSource report, revealing the top five biggest VC funds raised last quarter:

• Tiger Global Private Investment Partners X: $2.5 billion for multi-stage
• OrbiMed Private Investment VI: $950 million for multi-stage
• Trinity Ventures XII LP: $400 million for early-stage
• Foundation Capital VIII LP: $325 million for early-stage
• ICONIQ Strategy Partners II LP: $324 million for multi-stage

Overall, in spite of deflation in number of deals and amount raised by U.S. companies, Dow Jones found that venture capital fundraising actually increased in amount raised by 72 percent. Number of funds remained relatively unchanged.

On the ScaleVP blog, firm partner Rory O'Driscoll addressed the ongoing market deflation and how he and his fellow colleagues see it:

“Writing in January 2016 as fear waxes and euphoria wanes, we are reminded again that financial markets are fickle but technology trends are strong. Trends like cloud and mobile adoption, the confluence of big data and machine learning, and the re-architecting of the enterprise tech stack are going to drive and disrupt the tech industry for the next ten years.”

Indeed, the enterprise space has long been perceived as more reliable than the consumer space, where the loftiest valuations abound.

The new fund from ScaleVP will be managed by several of the firm’s longstanding partners, including Stacey Bishop, Kate Mitchell, Rory O’Driscoll, Andy Vitus, who have all been at the firm for at least 12 years. Additionally, Ariel Tseitlin, who joined the firm two years ago after heading up Cloud Solutions at Netflix, will be managing the fund as well.