Venture agency CRV raises $750M, downsizing after returning capital to buyers

CRV has secured $750 million towards the 55-year-old venture firm’s twentieth flagship fund, it announced on Friday.

The new fund is smaller than the $1 billion early-stage fund CRV closed in the fall of 2022. At that time, the firm also announced a $500 million second Select fund, a capital pool for backing late-stage rounds of existing portfolio companies.

It’s no surprise that CRV is not raising a late-stage fund as part of its new fundraise. Last year, the firm told The New York Times it was returning $275 million from its $500 million Select fund to investors. The firm explained that it would not be raising another late-stage vehicle because follow-on rounds for many of its companies would lower its overall returns.

CRV’s limited partners were eager to back the firm’s smaller fund, the firm said. It raised its entire $750 million fund in just four weeks, with demand for double that amount, CRV wrote.

The latest fund will be used to invest in seed and Series A startups and it will focus on backing consumer and devtools companies.

CRV is known for leading DoorDash’s seed financing and the Series A rounds for both Mercury and Vercel, a cloud platform for web developers, which was last valued at $3.25 billion.

Since its founding in 1970, CRV has backed over 750 startups, with 80 of them eventually going public.

The firm’s latest investments include CodeRabbit, a startup for AI code review, and Outtake, a company that uses AI for cybersecurity.