Why Greylock capped its new fund at $1.5B when it says it could have raised more

While many top-tier venture firms keep raising massively larger funds, Greylock Ventures, one of the oldest and most prestigious venture firms in Silicon Valley, is intentionally resisting the trend of ballooning fund sizes.

On Tuesday, the 61-year-old firm announced that it had raised a $1.5 billion 18th fund. The number is 50% higher than its previous $1 billion vehicle from 2023 and roughly matches the capital the firm raised across seed and flagship funds during the pandemic. Still, Greylock partner Saam Motamedi told TechCrunch that Greylock could have easily raised a “multiple” of that figure, suggesting the partnership decided restraint was the better path at a time when fund sizes across the industry keep climbing.

“Our mission is to be the most important partner to the most important entrepreneurs,” Motamedi said. The firm prides itself on introducing its portfolio companies to top engineers and potential customers, as it did for Baseten, an AI infrastructure startup that is now valued at $13 billion, after first investing in its Series A in 2022. But Motamedi said Greylock can offer that level of support only by keeping the number of companies it backs small.

The firm’s 10 partners make only one or two new investments each annually, a pace Motamedi said will result in roughly 25 portfolio companies from this fund.

Like its predecessors, the new fund will focus primarily on incubating companies from the earliest stages and leading seed and Series A rounds. This is where Greylock has built its reputation; the firm has a strong track record of starting companies from scratch, most notably security giant Palo Alto Networks, which launched inside Greylock’s offices 21 years ago, and the email security startup Abnormal, which Greylock incubated in 2018 and that was last valued at $5.1 billion.

Even so, Greylock doesn’t stick strictly to early-stage deals. It will also back high-potential, later-stage companies even if it “missed them early on,” Motamedi said. The firm’s 17th fund included three such growth-stage bets: Anthropic, Revolut, and Wiz.

The firm made its first investment into Anthropic when the AI company raised its Series F at a $183 billion valuation. “It’s the largest investment in the firm’s history,” Motamedi said.

Motamedi estimates that roughly 15% of the new fund will be deployed into later-stage startups, but he maintains that Greylock remains fundamentally an early-stage investor.

As proof, Motamedi said that when the partners meet every Monday to review their investment pipeline, the agenda consists primarily of people’s names rather than company names.

“We’re getting to know people even before they start a company. It’s really a bet on the person,” he said. “Often the company doesn’t even exist.’”