Lightspeed Venture rides on global exits, other companies scaling rapidly

Lightspeed invests from seed-stage to Series-B; often in pre-product or pre-revenue and then works closely with the company

Venture capital (VC) firm Lightspeed Venture Partners has had a dream run. In the past 18 months, the Menlo Park (US)-based company has made eight-nine exits (See box). Since it invests in early stages and picks up significant stakes in start-ups, several of these were multi-billion exits.  Salesforce bought business software firm Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, while Cisco Systems acquired AppDynamics for $3.2 billion. Many had Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) — Nutunix (current market cap of $8.5 billion), Zscaler ($3.5 billion), Stich Fix ($2 billion) and SnapChat ($19.9 billion). 

In all of these, Lightspeed was an early investor, with significant shareholding. 

Lightspeed