kleiner Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/kleiner/ Data-driven reporting on private markets, startups, founders, and investors Fri, 24 May 2019 14:04:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 /wp-content/uploads/cb_news_favicon-150x150.png kleiner Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/kleiner/ 32 32 Venerable Venture Shop Kleiner Makes Twin Bets On Health Startups /venture/venerable-venture-shop-kleiner-makes-twin-bets-on-health-startups/ Fri, 24 May 2019 14:04:25 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=18780 Morning Markets: Happy Friday, let’s check in on what the new crew at Kleiner are up to.

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Now that Kleiner’s split from Mary Meeker (now of Bond) is , its new crew is free to make its mark. That in mind, I’ve been keeping an eye on where , , , , and the rest deploy capital out of their new fund.1

Given that Kleiner is a firm with a number of investing partners and a host of prior investments to top-up from time to time, its deal flow is .

Still, Kleiner announced a brace of deals in the health space this week that caught my eye. Let’s peek at a few recent deals from the group, see if we can find a pattern, and then poke at the health-tech deals and see if they fit into the mix in any particular way.

Recently

Returning to the start of April, Crunchbase has Kleiner down as taking part in the , the , the , the , the , the , and the . All that before we even get to its latest health-related deals.

It’s a lot of deal flow to keep track of. Really an impossible amount if you want to do anything else, but for fun, here’s how I would categorize those deals:

  • : HR and personal redemption.
  • : Logistics.
  • : AI.
  • : “Social P2P Marketplace for Gen Z (YC W18)” per Crunchbase, which I cannot improve upon.
  • : Dev tools.
  • : Furniture-as-a-service.
  • : Maisie Williams’s creative collab startup.

The list of recent early-stage deals from Kleiner is pretty diverse. It doesn’t, at least looking at this fraction of Kleiner’s deals, have a super consistent theme; vertical SaaS or greentech this is not.

When I started writing to you this morning, I had hoped that we’d find some trend to put the and the into, but I can’t quite see it. So, let’s examine those two firms so that we have at least that in hand:

  • : A coaching app focused on “1-on-1 digital training” per . If you are somewhat wealthy (have a smartphone, have access to gym equipment, and can afford to pay around $150 a month for extra training), the service will help you work out more often and better, I presume. Kleiner led its $8.5 million Series A.
  • : A mental health “platform” for employers to take better care of workers, it seems. The firm’s website isn’t super explicit (it’s lists team, values, and leadership, but not a declarative we-do-this statement), but there’s a lot to like here, frankly. It’s working to lessen a material problem (the lack of mental healthcare available to folks), was founded by women, and appears to have all sides of its marketplace of sorts figured out (employees, employers, care providers). Kleiner co-led its $9 million Series A.

So today we’ve learned two things. First, that Kleiner is cutting lots of checks. And, that it’s doing so with self-confidence. You don’t get that many deals done in that many spaces if you aren’t trusting yourself, I reckon.

Illustration: .


  1. Those are the only four from Kleiner’s current list of investors I’ve met; there are others like Josh Coyne, etc.

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Mary Meeker’s New Growth Fund In Context /venture/mary-meekers-new-growth-fund-in-context/ Thu, 25 Apr 2019 14:28:10 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=18325 It is no surprise that venerable venture veteran raised a new large capital pool for late-stage bets. Her results at Kleiner are nigh-legendary. And those results were put up during a time of turmoil at the famous firm.

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Fortune’s this week in Silicon Valley. But Meeker’s new capital concern, the freshly-dubbed Bond, is actually wealthier than you might have guessed.

A $1.25 billion fund — the amount that Bond has raised — is only so big in the era of SoftBank’s epic $100 billion Vision Fund (which don’t forget, it wants more capital), but it’s actually larger than what Meeker has had at her disposal to-date.

Pulling , here’s a look at the history of Meeker’s three Kleiner-dubbed funds and the newly-established Bond vehicle:

In short, Meeker has a quarter billion dollarsĀ more to work with than she did before. That’s a lot of money to play with.

And, as we track huge funding rounds, it seems she won’t lack for places to deploy the capital; the private market has a host of huge companies inside its arms that will need more funding to continue. In a sense, the endemic lack of profitability among unicorns today is an opportunity for Meeker.

I suspect that taking capital from Meeker will retain all prior cachet, despite losing the Kleiner tag. Indeed, among younger founders, I wonder if her brand isn’t simply bigger than her former employer’s own. (That said, the seem like fine folks in person; we’ll see how they do when the returns come in).

The only concern I can see on the horizon for the newly-capitalized Meeker is the macro climate. As we noted earlier this week, the markets are hot at the moment. But momentum is reversible. And we’re overdue for a correction. How growth capital fares in a bear market will be interesting to watch.

Illustration: .

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