Bessemer raises $5.75B for two new funds, betting big on AI

Bessemer Venture Partners announced Wednesday that it raised $5.75 billion across two new funds to accelerate its investing across all parts of the AI stack. The firm allocated $1.75 billion to seed and early-stage investing and the remaining $4 billion to growth-stage startups.

Bessemer built its reputation as a leading VC of the SaaS era, with a track record of picking enterprise winners like Box, DocuSign, and Gainsight. Its current portfolio includes Anthropic, Cognition, Legora, Perplexity, Ramp, Shopify, and Waymo. Since 2022, the firm has invested in more than 260 AI-native companies, and it says it has put $3 billion into AI-related startups so far, spanning compute, infrastructure, foundation models, dev tools, app-layer products, and agentic tech.

Bessemer now frames AI as its central opportunity. “AI-native companies are scaling faster than any category of technology we’ve backed before,” Bessemer partner Byron Deeter said in the firm’s funding announcement. He also told Bloomberg that VC firms need to keep growing their war chests, arguing that companies staying private for longer now represents a lasting structural change in the industry.

Why it matters

The raise signals that late-stage VCs are still racing to expand AI-dedicated capital even as private companies delay IPOs, a dynamic that keeps funding available to AI startups without forcing them toward public markets.