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In 1911, Henry Phipps founded Bessemer Securities to reinvest the proceeds of his sale of Carnegie Steel for the benefit of his descendents. The start-up investment operations were spun out into Bessemer Venture Partners.

history of BVP

In 1872, Henry Phipps, Jr. and Andrew Carnegie co-founded Carnegie Steel, an innovative steel producer that commercialized an industrial process licensed from Lord Henry Bessemer. When they sold their startup 29 years later, Henry formed a family office to re-invest his proceeds into other entrepreneurial ventures like his own. He adopted the Bessemer name to honor the inventor behind his startup's success.
 
A century later, Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) continues one of the longest-running records of success in the venture capital industry. Over the course of its history, investors at the firm formed or funded over 100 startups that grew into independent public companies. They provided seed funding for early industrial companies like WR Grace, Ingersoll Rand and International Paper, retail innovators like Staples, The Sports Authority and Blue Nile, new drug developers like Isis and Perseptive Biosystems, service pioneers like Gartner Group, Bright Horizons and Celtel, and high-tech innovators like Ciena, Parametric, VMX, DSP Group (now Intel), Maxim, Flarion (now Qualcomm), Skype, and LinkedIn.
 
Today, BVP has offices in New York, Silicon Valley, Boston, Mumbai and Herzliya and manages more than $4 billion of venture capital invested in over 130 companies around the world. BVP focuses investment activity around several well-developed thematic "roadmaps", seeking out entrepreneurial opportunities that align with these themes across a wide mix of industries, geographies, and stages - many of our portfolio companies, like Ungermann Bass and Verisign, have been incubated in our offices based on ideas arising from these roadmaps.
 

Beyond roadmap investing, the everyday priority of BVP professionals is applying our startup experience to support the entrepreneurs we back. Since 2010 Bessemer Venture Partners has realized eleven IPOs including Cornerstone, Broadsoft, LinkedIn, Yelp, Millennial Media, Eloqua and LifeLock and multiple major acquisitions of companies in our portfolio (IAG by Nielsen, Sirtris by Glaxo, Gracenote by Sony, Bladelogic by BMC, PA Semi by Apple, Pure Networks by Cisco, Storwize by IBM, Vertica by HP, and Endeca by Oracle to name a few).

Learn more about BVP's roadmap investing strategy here.