Khosla Ventures goes after $3B in new funds • TechCrunch

Despite a slowdown in deploying venture capital, U.S. venture capital firms had few problems attracting capital for new funds in 2022.

We now have a new opportunity to see if this trend will continue: Khosla Ventures is raising about $3 billion across three new funds, according to regulatory filings.

The firm, founded by Vinod Khosla in 2004, plans to raise $1.5 billion for a Fund VIII, $1 billion for a second opportunity fund and $400 million for a new seed fund.

Trying to go after such a large chunk of change is not unusual for Khosla Ventures, if last year told us anything. The firm raised over $550 million for its first Opportunity Fund after taking in $1.4 billion for its Fund VII.

Current VC chatter seems to say that many firms may not be able to raise their next fund. However, unlike other VC firms, Khosla does have decent returns. It invested in companies like Affirm, Square, DoorDash. It also has a stake in both Instacart and OpenAI.

As mentioned, this comes at a time when VC firms are doing well attracting money for new funds. We reported that $150.9 million was raised by U.S. VC firms across 593 funds through the third quarter of 2022.

Overall, firms raised a record $162.6 billion across 767 funds for the year even as deal activity dropped off, suggesting firms will continue this pattern of slowing down deployment of capital in 2023.