Investing Early Gives Insight Partners’ $20 Billion Fund an Edge

• Insight Partners has raised a new $20 billion fund, the latest in a series of mammoth VC funds.
• Managing director Ryan Hinkle told Insider the firm’s tactics aren’t changing in the market downturn.
• Insight has devoted much of its attention to early-stage startups to gain a competitive advantage.

As the public market churns, private market investors are now reconsidering where they put their cash. 

Enthusiasm for later-stage startups has precipitously cooled off, as many firms that pumped billions in those companies over the past two years are now reportedly looking towards younger startups.

But one firm doesn’t plan to change its investing strategy at all. 

Ryan Hinkle, a managing director at Insight Partners, one of the older tech-focused private-equity and venture-capital firms, told Insider that the firm isn’t making any significant changes to its investment tactics. 

That’s largely in part because Insight has already been a very active early-stage investor. The firm led Crunchbase’s roundup of top Series A investors last fall, for instance.

The latest shift in private market investing may or may not bode well for Insight Partners, but it will certainly have the cash to take on its competitors. The firm just announced a whopping $20 billion fund, which eclipses the already-gargantuan funds that firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global have raised.

Insight previously raised $9.5 billion for its last flagship fund in April 2020.

“We will continue to invest aggressively because we believe we are still in the early innings of software’s disruption in the world to create and expand human potential,” he said.

While Insight typically won’t invest in a startup before it’s launched a product, Hinkle said, it is quite willing to back companies once they’ve found a solid and fast-growing customer base — one of the typical benchmarks investors look for in a Series A round.

Like several other high-velocity investors, Insight proactively seeks out potential startup investments, rather than waiting for founders to contact its VCs. Investing in startups early on helps lend the firm a competitive advantage, Hinkle told Insider.

“The best way to be in position to do a Series B is to have already been there for the Series A, and the best way to do a Series C is to already have been there for the Series B,” Hinkle said.

And because the firm commands more than $90 billion in total assets under management, it’s easily able to make several follow-on investments into the companies it backs, thereby enabling it to maintain — or increase — its stake.

The firm also has an extensive team of more than 100 employees who work with its portfolio companies in areas such as marketing and business development — an area in which it’s planning to make further investments.

“This fund gives us the capability to do that at even earlier moments in a company’s scale-up journey and later moments in a company’s scale-up journey,” Hinkle said.