Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm with headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The firm was founded in 2000 by four partners; Peter Nieh, Chris Schaepe, Ravi Mhatre, and Barry Eggers. In addition to its Silicon Valley office, Lightspeed operates in China, Israel and India. As of 2018, the firm employed nearly 100 people across it’s four offices. Lightspeed portfolio companies fall into a range of different business sectors, from consumer technology to enterprise hardware.

Lightspeed began when the four founding partners left the investment management company Weiss, Peck & Greer after its sale to another investment management company, Robeco. More recently, Lightspeed raised capital for two new funds in 2016 with a total capitalization of $1.2 billion. Lightspeed made headlines in 2012 by providing the nascent consumer technology company, Snapchat, with bridge funding following it’s seed funding round. At the time of Snapchat’s IPO in 2017, Lightspeed, along with Benchmark Capital, held the largest non-founder equity stake in the company. Since its inception, Lightspeed has invested in over 300 companies. Current and previous portfolio companies include Honest Company, Rubrik, Affirm, Blend, Docker and Nest, as well as Snapchat.