Bessemer Raises $5.75 Billion to Double Down on AI

Bessemer Venture Partners has raised $5.75 billion across two new funds, the firm announced on Wednesday, with every dollar aimed at the AI stack.

The raise splits into $1.75 billion for seed and early-stage investing and $4 billion for growth-stage startups. The firm frames the capital as a way to accelerate investment across all parts of AI: compute, infrastructure, foundation models, developer tools, app-layer companies, and agentic technology.

Bessemer's portfolio already reads like an AI index. The firm has backed Anthropic, Cognition, Legora, Perplexity, Ramp, Shopify, and Waymo. Since 2022, it has invested in more than 260 AI-native companies. In total, Bessemer says it has put $3 billion into AI-related startups to date.

The new funds mark a pivot for a firm built on enterprise software. Bessemer earned its reputation as a leading venture investor in the SaaS era, with a track record of picking enterprise winners including Box, Docusign, and Gainsight. Now the firm positions AI as the defining opportunity of the moment — a stance shared across much of the venture industry, as each successive technology cycle tends to attract the same superlatives.

"AI-native companies are scaling faster than any category of technology we've backed before," Bessemer Partner Byron Deeter said in the funding announcement.

Deeter offered a second rationale for the larger war chest. Speaking to Bloomberg, he said companies staying private longer has become "a permanent structural shift," which forces venture firms to keep raising bigger funds to support portfolio companies through extended private lives.

The size of the raise signals where Bessemer expects returns to come from in the coming decade. With $4 billion of the $5.75 billion earmarked for growth-stage deals, the firm is betting that the biggest AI winners will need sustained capital injections long before they reach public markets.