by George White
[Posted on November 6, 2007 - 12:05 PM]
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DiggSilicon Valley venture capital firm Technology Crossover Ventures announced Tuesday the closing of this year's largest investment fund at $3 billion.
The Palo Alto, Calif., firm's seventh fund gives it $7.7 billion in total capital under management, and comes only two years after TCV's earlier $1.4 billion fund.
Rick Kimball, a founding general partner at TCV, said that the new vehicle's size was dictated by a desire to extend its life. "As much as we like fundraising, we actually like investing better," said Kimball. "The whole goal of raising this size fund is to be out of the fundraising business for two more years than we had before."
With Fund VI expected to be fully deployed by early 2008, Kimball said TCV wanted Fund VII to be invested over four years, as opposed to the two years it took for Fund VI.
"We'd rather invest over a four-year period," Kimball said. "We'll stick to our knitting, doing exactly the same types of deals and transactions we've always done, just over a longer period."
Technology Crossover Ventures plans to keep to its core strategy of investing in late-stage technology companies. The firm focuses on five sectors: Internet; financial technology; infrastructure and communications; software and services; and healthcare IT.
Limited partners in Fund VII consist primarily of public and private pension funds from North America, Europe and Asia, university endowments, financial institutions, family offices and technology entrepreneurs.
TCV's penchant for making big bets has paid off well for the firm. According to performance disclosures by the California Public Employees' Retirement System, TCV's last fund TCV VI has a sky-high IRR of 46.2%.
As one of the few venture capital firms still raising multibillion-dollar vehicles, TCV is known for being the lead investor in some of the largest financings of the last two years. Since 2005 TCV has been a part of a $108 million round for Webroot Software Inc., and paid $77 million for a minority stake in online London-based foreign exchange platform FXall, run by FX Alliance LLC.
