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CRV, a more than 50-year-old venture firm, is returning to investors $275 million from its $500 million Select fund, which backs later-stage rounds of existing portfolio companies, the New York Times reported.
The firm is one of the first established Silicon Valley outfits to return committed capital to investors. (We reported yesterday that India’s largest venture investor Peak XV had slashed its $2.85 billion fund by $465 million.)
CRV partners said they realized that investing in follow-on rounds of many of its companies would lower the firm’s overall returns. At current prices, these startups would need to eventually be worth about $10 billion, and there aren’t many existing companies that could reach that size, said CRV partner Saar Gur.
The firm raised the Select fund along with a $1 billion fund for early-stage startups in 2022. CRV said its next early-stage fund will be smaller and it doesn’t plan to raise another Select fund.
This isn’t the first time CRV has reduced its fund size. In 2002, shortly after the dot-com bubble burst, the firm cut its fund from $1.2 billion to $450 million. Other firms to slash their fund sizes in that era included Kleiner Perkins, Accel, and Redpoint Ventures.
