Norwest Venture Partners Raises Third $1.2 B Venture Fund

Silicon Valley venture fund Norwest Venture Partners announced today it raised $1.2 billion for a new investment fund. The Palo Alto, CA-based firm raised the same amount for each of its two previous funds.

Counting the new fund, Norwest’s total capital and commitments add up to more than $6 billion.

Norwest, founded in April 1961, said seven of its portfolio companies have gone public and 15 have been acquired over the past 18 months. These exits include 2014’s $1 billion IPO for San Francisco-based Lending Club (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LC]]), which Norwest started supporting in the company’s early stages. Google, Amazon, Uber, Alibaba, and others acquired various Norwest portfolio companies.

Norwest’s global funds have invested in a range of technology types, including cybersecurity, Web-based software, consumer apps, educational technology, and healthcare. The new fund will focus on early to late stage venture and growth equity investments, across a similarly wide range of sectors and geographic regions, the firm said.

Norwest has invested in more than 575 companies since it was founded nearly 55 years ago. It now has more than 130 active companies in its portfolio.

Author: Bernadette Tansey

Bernadette Tansey is a former editor of Xconomy San Francisco. She has covered information technology, biotechnology, business, law, environment, and government as a Bay area journalist. She has written about edtech, mobile apps, social media startups, and life sciences companies for Xconomy, and tracked the adoption of Web tools by small businesses for CNBC. She was a biotechnology reporter for the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle, where she also wrote about software developers and early commercial companies in nanotechnology and synthetic biology.