DFJ Growth closes Fund II on $470 mln

DFJ Growth has closed its second fund, DFJ Growth 2013, on $470 million to target rapidly scaling tech companies. Draper Fisher Juvetson has raised about $800 million in fresh capital including the growth fund and DFJ Venture XI, which closed on $325 million earlier this year.

DFJ’s blog post:

Today we’re announcing the closing of our latest DFJ Growth fund, an oversubscribed $470 million pool of capital targeting private technology companies that are scaling rapidly and poised for category leadership. Paired with DFJ Venture XI, the $325 million early-stage focused fund we announced in February, our firm has raised nearly $800 million in fresh capital to support extraordinary entrepreneurs who think big and are changing the world through innovation and technological advancement.

When we formed our DFJ Growth practice in 2006, we predicted a changing landscape for private company investing, in which risk tolerance among public market investors would be reduced going forward, and as such, private companies would require greater maturity and scale to access the public markets. We believed this would cause a sea change for how young technology companies are financed, where these companies would stay private longer and would require additional sources of venture capital to fuel their growth as they scale toward maturity and liquidity. Our hypothesis from a decade ago has played out largely as we envisioned, where companies typically stay private longer now and raise more private capital to scale their businesses, creating opportunity for later-stage focused funds like DFJ Growth. We believe this trend will continue, and we are excited by the vote of confidence from our existing and new limited partners in supporting our vision, our strategy, our team and our new fund at DFJ Growth.

Our prior fund has been fortunate to partner with many game changing and disruptive leaders in the technology industry, including AdMob, Box, SolarCity, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Tumblr, Twitter and Yammer. These companies have been driven forward by tremendous entrepreneurial leaders. They are the real heroes, and we are grateful for the opportunity to work with each of them.

Our latest DFJ Growth fund is a natural progression of the later-stage investing practice we started almost a decade ago. Our fundamental investment strategy remains the same — to partner with extraordinary entrepreneurs who are changing the world in important ways through innovation, and who are scaling their businesses rapidly and ascending toward category leadership with disruptive, breakout potential. We continue to pursue these types of exceptional companies across a broad range of investment themes in the enterprise, consumer and disruptive enabling technology sectors. Our senior investment team remains the same for our new DFJ Growth fund, led by the four co-founders of DFJ Growth — John Fisher, Mark Bailey, Randy Glein and Barry Schuler — a seasoned group with decades of collective investing, operating and entrepreneurial experience working with some of the world’s most successful technology companies.

We have already made five investments from this new DFJ Growth fund, including DataStax, Formlabs, Foursquare, SimpliVity and SpaceX, and are excited by the innovation and progress being made by each of these remarkable companies. We see a tremendous wave of innovation continuing unabated, and we are thrilled for the opportunity to partner with the newest generation of entrepreneurs who are thinking big and changing the world.