Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc.. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are often from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California which specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management.
Mayfield, also known as Mayfield Fund, is a US-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage to growth-stage investments in enterprise and consumer technology companies. Founded in 1969 and based in Menlo Park, California, it is one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture capital firms.
GTCR LLC is a Chicago, Illinois-based private equity firm focused on leveraged buyout, leveraged recapitalization, growth capital and rollup transactions. The firm principally invests in high-growth industries, including financial services & technology, healthcare, information services & technology, and growth business services.
Norwest Venture Partners (Norwest) is an American venture and growth equity investment firm. The firm targets early to late-stage venture and growth equity investments across several sectors, including cloud computing and information technology, Internet, SaaS, business and financial services, and healthcare. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Norwest has offices in San Francisco and subsidiaries in Mumbai, India and Tel Aviv, Israel. The firm has funded more than 700 companies since inception.
Burr, Egan, Deleage & Co. (BEDCO) was a venture capital firm which focused on investments in information technology, communications, and healthcare/biotechnology companies.
Arlington Capital Partners is a Washington, DC based private equity firm focusing on leveraged buyout and recapitalization investments in middle market companies. Started in 1999, the firm manages $7.0 billion of committed capital out of five investment funds.
Terry McGuire is a co-founder and general partner of Polaris Partners based in the Boston office. McGuire focuses on life sciences investments.
Lux Capital is a venture capital firm based in New York City. It was founded in 2000, and focuses on investments in emerging technologies.
Babak "Bobby" Yazdani is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and investor specializing in early-stage, private U.S.-based modern enterprise technology companies.
Jonathan A. Flint is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who co-founded venture capital firms Polaris Partners and Polaris Founders Capital, as well as the companies Living Proof and Icelandic Provisions.
Funding Societies is a Southeast Asian digital financing platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), headquartered in Singapore. It was the first such platform in Singapore to engage an escrow agency to independently and safely manage investors’ funds. In Indonesia it is known as Modalku. Since its launch, it has disbursed more than US$2.6 billion in business financing to MSMEs through more than 5.1 million loan transactions.
Pitango VC, established in 1993, is Israel's largest venture capital fund with over $2.8 billion under management. Pitango VC invests through three dedicated funds, Pitango First, Pitango HealthTech, and Pitango Growth. Pitango invests in startups around the world, in domains such as Vertical SaaS, Digital Health, Deep Tech, FinTech & InsureTech, Devops, Generative AI, Web3, and FoodTech.
DCM (also known as DCM Ventures) is a venture capital firm located in Silicon Valley, Tokyo and Beijing. DCM was one of the first venture capital firms to invest in the early-stage technology sector in China, beginning in 1999. It has increasingly shifted away from Chinese investments due to US sanctions against China.
YL Ventures is an American-Israeli venture capital firm that specializes in seed stage cybersecurity investments.
Venture capital in Poland is a segment of the private equity market that finances early-stage high-risk companies based in Poland, with the potential for fast growth. As of March 2019, there is a total of 130 active VC firms in Poland, including local offices of international VC firms, and VC firms with mainly Polish management teams. Between 2009–2019, these entities have invested locally in over 750 companies, which gives an average of around 9 companies per portfolio. The Polish venture market accounts for 3% of the entire European ecosystem of VC investments, mainly in the digital space.
Left Lane Capital is a global venture capital firm that invests in internet and technology companies with a consumer orientation. The firm is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, with an office in London.
Amy Weinfeld Schulman is an American healthcare biotech venture capitalist, trained as a lawyer, who serves as a managing partner at Polaris Partners and a trained lawyer. She focuses on investing in healthcare companies and early-stage biotech start-ups. She also chairs the Board of Directors for Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and ByHeart, and represents Polaris as a director for Kallyope, Thirty Madison, QurAlis, and Larkspur. She also practiced as a lawyer.
Graphene Ventures is a venture capital firm that invested primarily in early-stage tech companies in enterprise software and consumer technology. The firm operates in Palo Alto, Toronto (Canada), São Paulo (Brazil), and Riyadh.
