Bessemer Raises $5.75 Billion to Double Down on AI

Bessemer Venture Partners has raised $5.75 billion in new capital to invest across seed, early-stage and growth companies, giving the firm fresh ammunition as artificial intelligence accelerates both company formation and scaling.

The firm raised the capital in a single close. It divides into $1.75 billion for seed and early-stage investments and $4 billion for growth-stage opportunities — an allocation that expands Bessemer's ability to invest throughout a company's lifecycle, from pre-revenue startups to established private companies raising large growth rounds.

Artificial intelligence is expected to be a major focus of both pools. Since 2022, Bessemer has invested more than $3 billion across more than 260 AI-native companies spanning computing infrastructure, foundation models, developer platforms, applications and AI agents.

"AI is creating a generational opportunity, and this capital strengthens our ability to make the first bets on the founders shaping the AI age," Bessemer Partner Jeremy Levine said.

Early stage still anchors the strategy

Despite the substantial capital earmarked for later-stage investments, early-stage venture investing remains central to Bessemer's approach. Approximately 70% of the firm's investments are made at the early stage.

The new $1.75 billion early-stage pool will support Bessemer's longstanding practice of identifying emerging technology markets and investing before companies have established significant revenue or before their categories have fully developed. That strategy produced early positions in companies such as Abridge, Perplexity, Shopify, Toast and Wonderful.

A $4 billion growth engine

The larger portion — $4 billion — will go to Bessemer's expanding later-stage platform. The firm has built out its growth strategy as technology companies stay private longer and increasingly build significant enterprise value before reaching the public markets.

What began as an extension of Bessemer's early-stage investing has evolved into a dedicated growth operation with its own capital and investment partners. The structure allows Bessemer to make concentrated investments in existing portfolio companies as they scale while also backing later-stage businesses that were never in its portfolio.

Companies associated with that strategy include Anthropic, DriveNets, fal, ClickHouse, Cognition, EliseAI, EvenUp, Legora, Ramp, ShopMy and Waymo.

"AI-native companies are scaling faster than any category of technology we've backed before," Bessemer Partner Byron Deeter said. "The expansion of our growth practice is built for that velocity, with dedicated capital and partners to lead concentrated, high-conviction rounds."

The two-pool structure gives Bessemer flexibility to participate in financing rounds across a wide range of company sizes. It also mirrors how venture firms broadly are adapting to an environment in which some AI companies require substantially larger amounts of capital for computing infrastructure, model development, talent and commercialization.

A thesis across the full stack

Bessemer's AI thesis extends across the technology stack rather than concentrating on a single layer. The firm invests in the infrastructure and computing systems underpinning AI, foundation models, software development platforms, applications and agent-based technologies.

The strategy also draws on investments made during earlier technology shifts, including cloud computing and software-as-a-service, as well as hardware, defense technology and physical AI.

The firm plans to deploy the new capital globally, with investment activity across the United States, Europe, India and Israel. Bessemer currently has investment teams in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, London, Bangalore and Tel Aviv.

The new funds add to a platform managing approximately $20 billion in assets. Bessemer has backed more than 450 companies and has seen more than 155 portfolio companies complete initial public offerings. Its historical portfolio includes Canva, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Rocket Lab, ServiceTitan and Twilio, alongside newer AI-focused investments including Anthropic, Abridge and Perplexity.

With $5.75 billion of fresh capital, Bessemer is positioning its platform around two parallel priorities: continuing to make early bets on emerging technology companies while deploying substantially larger sums into private businesses that have already reached the growth stage. The $4 billion growth allocation in particular gives the firm greater capacity to stay invested as portfolio companies scale — and to pursue the later-stage openings created by the rapid expansion of the AI market.