By Team CRV
In the fall of 2022, CRV unveiled $1.5 billion across two funds, a $1 billion early-stage fund and a $500 million Select Fund II to invest in later stage rounds of our most promising companies.
Today, we made the decision to re-focus our efforts on our core strategy, early-stage technology investing. As such, we have made the decision to release the remainder of Select Fund II ($275 million) to our Limited Partners. There is no change in our core business strategy and we continue to actively invest out of CRV XIX, our early stage fund.
CRV has a history of adjusting course when markets shift. Back in 2002, we handed $750 million back off of an active $1.2 billion fund. Fund XI had originally been raised in 2000, but we had concerns about deploying that capital responsibly given the macro environment. Many firms talked about it — CRV actually did it — and Fund XI ended up being a top performing fund.
We have been watching markets, and our portfolio, very closely for the last 18 months. If you look back at the reduction of Fund XI two decades ago, that decision came nearly two years after the Internet bubble started bursting.
We raised Select Fund I ($200 million) in 2020, and Select Fund II ($500 million) in 2022. At the time, public market comps supported venture-like returns in later-stage rounds of our best companies. Between 2022 and 2023, we saw an adjustment taking shape and it became more difficult to justify those returns.
Throughout our time as one of the longest running venture capital firms in history, CRV is a firm that has remained steadfast and focused on early-stage investing over more than five decades. We’ve proudly backed some of the strongest VC-backed businesses created over the past decade like DoorDash, Cribl, Vercel, Postman and others.
Many of the 600 companies we have invested in have grown into market leaders, attracting huge attention and many dollars for their balance sheets. As a result, many of our best companies simply don’t need more capital. In addition, there is so much capital out there that as soon as a company shows signs of breaking out prices get driven up and return potential goes down.
Our view is that every firm needs to have a strategy that starts with the people at the firm and market conditions. We have proven results across more than five decades of early-stage investing. We often tell our founders that they need to focus on what they are great at, and not lose that focus. This is exactly why we made this decision. We need to lead by example.
CRV XIX will continue to back the earliest stage startups. We expect to welcome a bevy of new seed and Series A companies into the CRV fold as we continue to actively invest in the best and the brightest early-stage founders. Some of our most recent early-stage investments include:
- Protege — The Platform for AI Training Data — CRV led Protege’s $10 million seed and joined the board in August 2024.
- CodeRabbit — Cut Code Review Time and Bugs in Half — CRV led CodeRabbit’s $16 million Series A and joined the board in July 2024.
- Napkin — The Visual AI for Business Storytelling — CRV co-led Napkin AI’s $10 million seed.
If you’re a founder actively building at the nascent stages of your business, get to know our investment team. We invest in a wide range of software companies that touch upon everything from AI and cybersecurity to next gen CRM, vertical SaaS, databases, devtools, infrastructure, consumer focused apps and marketplaces. Our three repeat Midas List winning investors (see Forbes, “The Midas List The World’s Best Venture Capital Investors In 2024”) and our entire team spent this summer investing with conviction in dynamic early stage founders and returning real cash to the limited partners who put their trust in us. We’re excited to welcome more dynamic early-stage founders to the CRV family this fall.
As you might imagine, given today’s announcement and the current climate, our next fund will have a smaller, tighter focus. More than five decades of investing has taught us that the landscape is constantly shifting and in the fast moving tech space, fortune favors the nimble.