To our founders, leaders, and friends

With every new investment this year came a new beginning for Bessemer, including some exciting inflection points for our leaders and companies.

Looking back on 2019

  • 5 IPOs: Pinterest, PagerDuty, Fiverr, Life360, and TeamViewer
  • Notable highlights: Anaqua was acquired by Astorg, Dynamic Yield was acquired by McDonald's, Habana Labs was acquired by Intel, SendGrid was acquired by Twilio, United Capital was acquired by Goldman Sachs, Verodin acquired by FireEye, and Viagogo entered an agreement to acquire StubHub.
  • Over 30 new companies joined our portfolio
  • $6 billion, total assets under management: In addition to BVP X, our $1.85 billion fund, we launched a $525 million growth fund. To lead Bessemer's growth practice, we welcomed Elliott Robinson as our newest partner.

From the early days to IPO

From early-stage to growth, we’re honored to be part of our founders' stories.

Bessemer’s backstory on Pinterest–from Series A to IPO: Jeremy Levine remembers meeting Ben and Evan in a small Palo Alto apartment on a rainy day before writing Pinterest's Series A check.

Pinterest year in review

How PagerDuty became the central nervous system for digital operations: Ethan Kurzweil shares what it was like to invest early in the DevOps category, and explains the forces that vaulted PagerDuty to market leadership.

PagerDutyIPO

Fiverr's evolution into a global marketplace for digital services: Adam Fisher explains the marketplace dynamics that underpin Fiverr’s thriving freelancer economy and what made the company "crazy enough" to work.

Fiverr end of year review

Roadmaps

Our growing community

We’re thankful for our community of leaders for sharing their learnings, best practices, and challenges with each other.

Joining us this year as mentors within our community, our executives-in-residence share their functional expertise and provide counsel for our founders and leaders.

At our fourth annual Cloud 100 Celebration, in partnership with Forbes, we recognized the top 100 founders and CEOs and toasted to the undeniable power of the cloud. Read more about Cloud 100.

Highlights and news from our companies

ACV Auctions: The online automotive marketplace raises $150M Series E to fuel product and company expansion
Alloy is the identity API powering the rebundling of financial services
Bevi lands $35M and is the smarter water cooler that gets to know your tastes
BigID is the backbone of the $100 billion+ data privacy industry
Bright Health's $635M Series D funding drives expansion across products, geographies and consumer bases
Choco is the ingredient ordering platform for restaurants, from the Michelin-starred to burger chains
DISCO raises $83M to expand into other legal tech markets
DriveNets: This startup founder sold his company to Cisco for $475 million. Now he’s raised $110 million to take the giant on.
DroneDeploy raises $35M for drone management and logistics tools
Electric raises $25M Series B to scale its chat driven IT support solution
Guild Education: The latest female-led company to hit $1B valuation
Intel acquires AI chipmaker Habana Labs for $2 billion
LaunchDarkly supercharges innovation for code-based businesses with feature management solutions
Bessemer invests in MyGlamm, India's beauty marketplace
Papaya Global raises $45M to expand payroll processing for a global workforce
Phantom Auto’s Series A: Teleoperations will enable the adoption of autonomous vehicles
Procore ranks as top company on the Cloud 100
ServiceTitan becomes a billion-dollar LA-based startup
Shift Technology is helping the insurance industry tackle fraud, a $100 billion problem
Sila Nano’s battery tech is now worth over $1 billion
Toast: The restaurant management platform raises $250M at a $2.7B valuation
Viagogo acquires StubHub from Ebay
Meet Weave: Utah’s next unicorn
Wildlife Studios raises $60 million for their Series A at a $1.3 billion valuation

Looking ahead

These are some of the roadmaps and opportunities we are diving deeply into for 2020.

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Ethan Kurzweil on gaming and e-sports

"Gaming is now one of the largest forms of entertainment in the United States, with more than $100B+ spent annually, surpassing other major mediums like television. It's a new form of a social network where you can spend time hanging with friends and family, even outside of the constructs of ‘winning the game.’ With that in mind, we’re spending most of our time looking in three spaces: social identity, infrastructure, and new studios.”

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Amit Karp on data infrastructure

“There is a desperate need to simplify the complex ‘plumbing’ required to organize and access data. This is especially true as cloud data lakes are used to store exponentially growing volumes of data and with the rising importance of accessing this data for almost every function in the enterprise.”

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Brian Feinstein on vertical software

"Cloud maturity and mobile ubiquity have created conditions for software to revolutionize any industry. In 2020, we expect Bessemer portfolio companies like Procore, Shopify, Toast, ServiceTitan, Restaurant365, Weave, Mambu, and Disco transform how many vertical markets operate."

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Talia Goldberg on remote work

"Eliminating geography as a constraint to talent is a game-changer for businesses. Now that most knowledge workers can communicate and collaborate remotely, going to work is more of a state of being than a destination. Workplaces of the future will rely on new software and systems that reimagine team architectures and habits and reinvent operations to serve a global and distributed workforce."

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David Cowan on drones

“Drones are transforming how field workers safely and accurately survey job sites across industries in construction, agriculture, energy, and more. We see drone solutions and software as major opportunities in a $6 billion global market."

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Alex Ferrara on SaaS trends

"One of the most surprising acquisitions of 2019 was McDonald’s purchase of DynamicYield, a Bessemer portfolio company. I don’t think any of us would have predicted that the world's most recognizable burger chain would be the ultimate buyer, and yet I don’t think this is an anomaly. In 2020, we're going to see more non-traditional buyers acquire SaaS companies as businesses in every industry adopt the cloud as part of a broader digital transformation."

To the next decade

We’re incredibly fortunate to partner with our founders, leaders, and friends. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.