So one of the biggest and most active growth stage VC funds, Insight Partmers, has raised a fresh $12 Billion to invest in B2B, AI, and more:
Screenshot
Insight (and Vista and Thoma Bravo) has been committed to SaaS and B2B since inception, and led many top investments, including Salesloft which I introduced them to and where I co-led the Series A and Vista later acquired for $2.3 Billion.
This is very good news. But it’s not perfect news. Parsing it a bit gives us a sense of where VC and the LPs them fund them is today:
- They raised the largest fund of the past 12 months at $12 Billion, and exceeded their latest target of $10 Billion. But that was down from the original target of $20 Billion, the size of their 2022 fund (raised at the peak in 2021).
- Some LPs “re-upped” (good) but at lower levels (stress). Per WSJ, Calpers put in $300m this time, vs. $520m for the last Insight fund. This is still a big positive — they came back big — but it also showed they were trying to reduce the overall size of commits to VC here. They’re still in, just not at the level of 2022.
- They returned a stunning $8 Billion last year to their LPs. Including Own, acquired by Salesforce for $1.9 Billion. But that liquidity mainly came from pre-2021 deals.
So this is great news for B2B and great news for Insight. But it wasn’t all 100% smooth sailing and also showed the latent stress in the VC and LP ecosystem.
Funding is back, fast and furious, fueled by AI. But there have only been 4 B2B / SaaS IPOs since 2021, and M&A is way down. That leads to stress.
