Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Greylock Partners expands XIII fund to $1B

By Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal

Greylock Partners said Tuesday it expanded its Greylock XIII fund to $1 billion and formed Greylock Growth, a fund focused on later-stage financings in breakout consumer Internet and enterprise companies.

Greylock Partners initially closed $575 million for Greylock XIII in November 2009. The firm is an investor in a number of early stage companies through this fund, including Airbnb, One Kings Lane, Pure Storage, Rally Software and Shopkick.

Greylock Discovery Fund has completed 20 seed stage investments since it was launched in September 2010. Investments from this fund range between $25,000 and $500,000; the fund is managed by Reid Hoffman, a partner at Greylock and co-founder and executive chairman of Mountain View-based LinkedIn Corp.

“Greylock Growth is the next phase of an explicit later stage strategy put in place five years ago with our initial investment in Facebook,” said David Sze, a partner at Menlo Park, Calif.-based Greylock and leader of the growth initiative.

Sze said Greylock Growth will invest $25 million to $200 million at a time "to help companies in the ‘winner’s circle’ maintain their dominant positions while they continue to grow and expand."

Since Greylock’s initial investment in early 2006 in Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook Inc., approximately 40 percent of the firm’s dollars have gone toward later stage companies.

Founded in 1965 in Boston, Greylock announced in May 2009 that it would move its headquarters to Silicon Valley.

The firm had long been expanding its California presence; at the time of the move, only two investing partners remained in its Boston-area office. The firm’s website now lists five Boston employees.