Announcing BCV Fund 2021
We are thrilled to announce Bain Capital Ventures Fund 2021, our ninth core fund, which totals $1.3 billion in fresh capital.
Our newest funds allow us to continue the mission we’ve been on for the past twenty years:
Be the partner of choice for technology founders from the earliest stages at seed and Series A through every stage of their growth.
While our fund vehicles have grown, we remain deeply committed to early stage, specifically seed and Series A. This may surprise some people who think of BCV as primarily later stage and wonder if early-stage investing is more of an aspirational goal rather than a statement of reality.
In truth, over the past year, we’ve made 37 seed and Series A investments, representing 88% of all our new investments, with the majority of these companies being pre-revenue at the time of our initial funding.
We’re also very committed to supporting and growing the early stage ecosystem. Over the course of the last four years we’ve partnered with dozens of emerging VC managers — today we work with more than 50 active pre-seed and seed funds that we’ve backed who have collectively invested in over 2,000 companies. We’re proud that the emerging managers we collaborate with come from a much more diverse set of backgrounds and experiences than what has been the norm for so long.
We started this journey 20 years ago as an exclusively Series A firm in Boston with a small group of partners. Since then, we’ve expanded our mandate to include growth equity, and we’ve built a geographic footprint, which now includes teams in SF (our largest office) and NYC (our second largest office). Along the way, we’ve been early backers and partners to the founders and teams at iconic and disruptive companies such as ACV Auctions, Armis, Attentive, Billtrust, DocuSign, Gainsight, Jet.com, LinkedIn, Rapid7, Rent the Runway, SendGrid, Signify Health, SolarWinds, SurveyMonkey, and Wrike.
During this evolution, we have stayed true to a few core values. Our partnership is a tight-knit group of company builders with deep startup and high-growth experience who are passionate about the work we do and the collaboration we have with our founders. Our founders work with not just their lead partner at BCV but also many members of our broader team, and as a result, they feel comfortable shooting a text or email to any of us at any time.
We each recognize our primary responsibility is to help make our founders successful. Our culture of teamwork and founder focus is built around the simple idea that we should always look for ways to help make the companies we back stronger and that doing so is full-team effort. We believe this approach leads to real, lasting impact, and it has created a culture and spirit at BCV that inspires our team and resonates with our founders.
We are at an exciting time in the history of technology and innovation. The pandemic has transformed how we work and live in profound ways and has accelerated the adoption of cloud technologies across industries. We are living in an era of unprecedented change in how we build and grow businesses. Modern tech companies can be built and can sell their products anywhere in the world, and their investors need a truly global perspective and operating footprint to support them effectively.
With Fund 2021, we are excited to double down on important trends that have only accelerated during the last few years and where we have already had the good fortune to partner with amazing founders building leading companies in their arenas. These massive waves of innovation include:
- The shift to digital commerce (Attentive, Bloomreach, Material Bank, ReCharge, ShipBob)
- Fintech and embedded payments (Airbase, AvidXchange, Flywire)
- Decentralized finance and crypto (BlockFi, Compound Finance, Digital Currency Group)
- Digital healthcare (Centivo, Signify Health)
- Next-generation cloud infrastructure (JupiterOne, Moveworks, Redis Labs)
- Product-led growth (Alloy, Clockwise, Homebase)
As a group, we are grateful for this opportunity to wake up everyday and work with some of the most creative, brilliant, fearless people on the planet. We are humbled by the many hundreds of founders who have chosen to partner with BCV over the course of the last 20 years.
Finally and most importantly, thank you to the many friends, angel investors, co-investors, LPs, founders, and members of the community who have been such great advocates for BCV along the way.
We love the BCV “extended family” and are deeply indebted to all of you for your introductions, wisdom, and support.