We're excited to announce Kleiner Perkins' nineteenth venture fund, KP19, with $700M to focus on early-stage investments in Enterprise, Consumer, Hardtech, Fintech, and Healthcare companies.
The last few years in venture capital have been incredibly exciting with more amazing entrepreneurs and growing businesses than ever before. The momentum in our industry is palpable, and the opportunity is bigger than ever. Success requires a Jedi-like focus and a small, nimble team of dedicated practitioners.
When we announced KP18 in January of last year, we said we were going "Back to the Future" at Kleiner Perkins — returning to our roots to focus exclusively on early-stage investing. The next phase is to deliver "Returns of the Jedi".
What we did in KP18
We were busy this past year or so, and accomplished what we set out to do with KP18:
- 30 out of 34 of our investments were either seeds, Series As, with the remainder being high-inflection Series Bs.
- Enterprise (15 companies) and HardTech (8 companies) were our most active sectors
- We saw strong momentum with Consumer (4 companies), the emergence of Healthcare (4 companies), and continued our investments in Fintech (3 companies)
- Our team continued to grown as we added leadership across marketing and business development to expand support for our companies
What's next for KP19
It's more of the same. It's the same team, with the same strategy, investing in the same sectors at the earliest stages. Our mission remains the same — to be the first call for founders who want to change the world and make history.
Our investment focus hasn't changed. The way we live and the way we work are intimately intertwined and we have an opportunity to improve both:
- Work is increasingly digital, distributed, and complex — we need better tools to do our jobs and free up time for personal health, self-fulfillment, and improvement. -All businesses are looking more and more like tech companies, and will need new infrastructure. From developer tools to vertical-specific applications, we expect software to power all areas of business.
- Work is becoming knowledge based and this transition is driving fundamental economic and urban shifts. For some, these changes are a blessing; but others will need help keeping up.
- Our lives are being digitized as well — the ways we live, eat, plan families, and move are different than even five years ago, and everything is increasingly tech-enabled.
- This digital world will require new foundations of both hardware and software, and an increasing focus on security and identity.
Our Team
Of all the things we've done over the past few years, we are most proud of the team that's come together at Kleiner Perkins. Annie Case, Monica Desai Weiss, Josh Coyne, and Haomiao Huang are our next generation. With KP19, we are excited to announce the promotions of Annie, Josh and Monica to Principal.
- Annie will lead investments in Consumer and Healthcare startups. She is involved with the boards of Future, Inkitt, and Modern Health.
- Josh will lead investments in Enterprise and Fintech. He was involved in KP's investments in Epic Games, Rippling, Robinhood, and UIPath. He is involved with the boards of Moveworks, Stord, and Viz.
- Monica will lead investments in Fintech and Consumer. She is involved with the boards of Bison Trails, Loom, Pillar, Propel, and Nova Credit.
We can't wait to meet the founders who'll make up KP19 and partner with them and their teams to build iconic companies. We are committed to our craft and to their success no matter how difficult the journey. As Yoda would say: "Do or do not. There is no try."