These Are the Top Investors at Lightspeed Funding $1 Billion Startups

On Sep 17, 2021

Lightspeed Venture Partners is supersizing its stable of unicorns.
So far this year, the venture capital firm has invested in 17 startups worth $1 billion or more.
Our analysis shows that a few partners are responsible for many of the deals.

Lightspeed Venture Partners has added an average of more than one unicorn startup to its portfolio every month this year, analysis of exclusive PitchBook data shows — a sign of the current funding frenzy that has swamped startups with cash.

A closer look reveals that just a handful of Lightspeed partners are responsible for many of the growth deals. In such a hot funding market for startups, one of the ways that firms win is through the reputation of its investors.

Among its top unicorn-hunters is founding partner Ravi Mhatre, who mostly focuses on early-stage companies. Mhatre has seen more than a dozen companies through to acquisition or public exits, and he’s looking to add more to the roster with investments in Exabeam, Offchain Labs, Aqua Security, and Snorkel AI. Exabeam may even be close to an exit. It hired a new CEO as part of the funding announcement, stirring rumors of plans to go public.

Lightspeed has nine partners on its growth team who led investments in other billion-dollar startups. Amy Wu, Arsham Memarzahdeh, and Will Kohler each landed two new unicorns in the first nine months of the year.

Brad Twohig, who leads the firm’s growth investing practice, is also having a winning streak with investments in Grafana Labs, Personio, and Matillion, the newest unicorn in Lightspeed’s stable.

So far in 2021, Lightspeed has joined funding rounds for 17 new unicorn startups that have a combined value of $29.7 billion. The firm led three of those deals, which typically means it wrote the biggest check of all investors.

Here’s the full list of Lightspeed portfolio companies that became unicorns in 2021.

To be sure, Lightspeed’s stable of new unicorns accounts for only a fraction of the startups that reached valuations of $1 billion or more this year. Last month alone, 42 companies joined the club, and that was the slowest month for crowning new unicorns so far in 2021, Insider’s April Joyner reported.

The biggest deal that Lightspeed led came out of the firm’s Israel outpost, where partner Yoni Cheifetz has been holding down the fort for 15 years. He led its investments in the cybersecurity startup At-Bay — which helps companies prevent network intrusions and data breaches before they happen — across four early-stage deals.

Lightspeed also has a record of doubling down on its strongest bets, the data shows. Of the 17 new unicorns, 15 were already portfolio companies. Notably, blockchain company Offchain Labs was a new investment, and the firm led its $100 million Series C round.

In a blog post, Wu wrote that she met Offchain’s founders — a computer science professor and two of his doctoral students — and they talked about how they started the company at Princeton University. Partners Wu and Mhatre decided to invest because of customers saying Offchain’s blockchain solutions were easier and better to use.

“Offchain Labs will be one of the most important teams driving the next stage of evolution on Ethereum,” she wrote.

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