Khosla Ventures closing $1 billion, again

Funding natural gas, social media-sourced narratives, word-of-mouth advertising and virtualization

Khosla Ventures, the VC firm started in 2004 by Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, is closing a $1.05 billion round for its new fund, Khosla Ventures IV, according to an SEC filing.

Back in September 2009, when Khosla closed just over a billion dollars with a quarter of that intended specifically for seed-stage companies, Vator writer Matt Bowman made a little jab at the Sun Microsystems co-founder: “Someone ought to tell Vinod about the economy.”

This time it’s, “someone ought to tell Vinod about the bubble.”

Perhaps it’s best, however, that no one tell Khosla anything, considering that he's more of a fan of vision than luck. Or so he quite memorably revealed a couple years ago:

"I still don’t believe in vision. I believe in bumbling around long enough to not give up on things. Eventually, when success comes your way because you've failed in every possible way, and the only way that’s left is the one successful way. And, always for those of you who are entrepreneurs, it seems to come last.

"This bumbling around is to me what vision is about. It’s the best way to be a visionary. You just keep failing enough, and not giving up."

Here are some investments Khosla has made this year:

January: Ciris Energy, a natural gas production company, closed a $23.8 million Series B round led by Khosla, with participation from previous investors Braemar Energy Ventures, Rho Ventures, and GE Energy Financial Services.

February: Storify, a website that allows users to create online narratives out of a compilation of their favorite tweets, videos, and pictures, secured $2 million from Khosla.

February:  Word-of-mouth advertising platform MyLikes raised $5.55 million in a Series A round led by Khosla, with participation from existing investors Lightseed Partners and Metamorphic Ventures.

April: Big Switch Networks, building a platform to bring the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks, secured $13.75 million in a Series A round led by Index Ventures and Khosla.

Other members of Khosla’s portfolio include Evolv, GroupMe, Jawbone, Meebo, Soladigm, Square and PayNearMe.