Institutional Venture Partners

History

While Reid W. Dennis was an analyst at the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company starting in 1952, he started an informal network of screened individual investors (now called angel investors). In 1974, Dennis founded Institutional Venture Associates (IVA), funded by six six institutions such as American Express. Burton J. McMurtry and David Marquardt, who had been involved with IVA, left and founded Technology Venture Investors, the first investor in Microsoft. These were some of the first venture capital firms located on Sand Hill Road near Stanford University, within Silicon Valley. With his personal wealth and that of other partners, Dennis founded Institutional Venture Partners in 1980. The first IVP fund had $2.2 million. In a field that was generally male-dominated, Ruthann Quindlen became a rare female general partner in 1994. After the burst of the dot-com bubble in 1999, partners from IVP combined with Brentwood Venture Capital formed Redpoint Ventures, which would specialize in digital media and Internet companies, and Palladium Venture Capital to focus on health science investments.

IVP specializes in venture growth investments, industry rollups, founder liquidity transactions, and select public market investments. It only makes a small number (about 12 to 15) relatively large investments per year. Its fourteenth fund raised about $1 billion in June 2012. Its fifteenth fund raised $1.4 billion in April 2015.

Investments

Early investments included ArcSight, Akamai Technologies, AppDynamics, Ask Jeeves, Business.com, Care.com, ComScore, Concur Technologies, Danger, Digital River, Dropbox, Foundry Networks, HomeAway, Juniper Networks, Kayak.com, LegalZoom, LifeLock, LSI Corporation, Marketo, MySQL, Netflix, ngmoco, Polycom, Quigo, RetailMeNot, Seagate Technology, Shazam, Spiceworks, TiVo, Websense, Zynga and Voxer.

IVP invested in Twitter in February 2009, and in Fleetmatics and Marketo in 2010.

In 2013, IVP invested in AppDynamics, Ayasdi, Datalogix (Oracle acquired Datalogix for $1.2 billion in January 2015), Dataminr, Dropcam that was later acquired by Nest in 2014, OnDeck Capital (OnDeck went public in December 2015), Oportun, Pure Storage (Pure Storage went public in October 2015), Snapchat, Supercell (Softbank and GungHo acquired a 51% interest in Supercell in October 2013 at a $3.1 billion valuation) and TuneIn.

In 2014, IVP invested in AdRoll, General Assembly (IVP general partner Todd Chaffee joined its board of directors), Indiegogo (as part of the deal, IVP General Partner Jules Maltz joined Indiegogo‘s board of directors), Klarna, Prosper Marketplace, SoundCloud, Threatstream (Anomali), Whip Networks, Woven Digital, xAd, ZEFR (IVP general partner Dennis Phelps joined ZEFR‘s board of directors), Zendesk (ZEN), Zenefits, and ZipRecruiter.

In 2015, IVP invested in AlienVault, App Annie (as part of the deal, IVP General Partner Eric Liaw joined App Annie's board of directors), Casper, Compass, GitHub, NerdWallet (as part of the deal, IVP General Partner Jules Maltz joined NerdWallet‘s board of directors), Pindrop (as part of the deal, IVP General Partner Somesh Dash joined Pindrop‘s board of directors), Slack, SoFi, SteelBrick (Salesforce acquires Steelbrick in December 2015), Sumo Logic, Tanium, Vessel, and Walker & Company Brands.