Lightspeed raises over €6.9B; unveils Lightspeed Faction to accelerate the blockchain ecosystem

California-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, a global venture capital firm focused on multi-stage investments in the enterprise, consumer, and health sectors, announced on Tuesday that it has raised over $7B (approximately €6.98B) across four funds. Lightspeed now brings its total committed capital under management to over $18B.

The VC firm announced the closing of Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Fund XIV at $1.98B, Lightspeed Venture Partners Select V at $2.26B, and Lightspeed Opportunity Fund II at $2.36B.

Additionally, Lightspeed also announced that Lightspeed India Partners have raised a $500M early-stage fund.

The current investment, which is nearly 60 per cent more than Lightspeed’s last flagship fund, will help the firm in expanding its early-stage vehicles and supporting its large and growing global platform.

Besides the funding, the firm also unveiled Lightspeed Faction, an independent team dedicated to “building on Lightspeed’s nine-year history of backing exceptional founders in blockchain infrastructure.”

About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the enterprise, consumer, health, and fintech sectors. The firm has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 500 companies globally. About a fourth of those companies have either been acquired or gone public, with 33 IPOs over the years.

The VC says that more than 30 per cent of Lightspeed’s consumer investments are in businesses with female founders, and the year 2021 was the “most” globally diversified in the company’s history. 

Lightspeed says its Healthcare practice generated over $1.2B in distributions.

The company has also invested over $1.5B in close to 100 global fintech companies, including $600M specifically in blockchain and emerging use cases. Stripe and Yelp veteran Justin Overdorff joined as a Partner in 2021 to help lead Lightspeed’s fintech practice.

Arif Janmohamed, Partner at Lightspeed, says, “We love to partner with and even incubate companies around core dislocations in the enterprise landscape and to build relationships with prospective entrepreneurs years before they are ready to start building.”

Lightspeed Venture Partners XIV

The goal of Lightspeed Venture Partners XIV is to aid innovators in the early phases of business growth. Lightspeed’s approach to working with and supporting businesses at all levels is driven by investing in startups from the very beginning of their development, from incubation through Seed to Series B.

With Europe becoming one of the most exciting startup markets in the world, the Lightspeed team hired Paul Murphy in 2021 to help lead the firm’s European office in the UK as a Partner. 

Lightspeed Venture Partners Select V

The Lightspeed Growth Team, under the direction of Lightspeed Venture Partners Select V, accelerates new investments and current Lightspeed portfolio businesses throughout the VC’s worldwide network.

Select V cements Lightspeed’s ability to back exceptional founders and outperforming companies, and increases Lightspeed’s exposure to companies as they scale and enter the growth phase. In the last six years, the company has invested $2.2B in early growth companies.

Lightspeed Opportunity Fund II and global team

The Lightspeed Opportunity Fund II is a platform for supporting up-and-coming businesses from all of the international markets where Lightspeed conducts business. 

Bejul Somaia, Partner at Lightspeed, says, “In the early 2000s, Lightspeed started building a global footprint given our conviction that the future of technology and entrepreneurship would be global. Today, Lightspeed has 70 investors located across twelve cities globally. By intentionally constructing cross-border deal teams, we’re able to offer founders local market knowledge and relationships, together with deep sector domain knowledge. In doing so, we’re all exposed to, and are learning from, the innovation that is happening across the world in order to better serve our founders.”

Lightspeed Faction

Lightspeed has also launched Faction, a new independent crypto-native team to drive transformation in the blockchain ecosystem. The Lightspeed global platform works with a skilled group of blockchain veterans known as Faction to connect extraordinary creators wherever they may be. 

Partner at Lightspeed, Ravi Mhatre says, “Lightspeed has been selectively investing in crypto since March 2013, and we believe that cryptocurrency can have a positive impact on a population of people who are underbanked or unbanked not only in the US but globally. We believe the industry is still early in the transition from web2 to web3, and the collaboration between Lightspeed and Faction is a testament to our shared belief in the ways that cryptocurrency may help to develop a web that better serves underserved people around the world.”