Social+Capital raises $600M in third investment fund, confirms Kleiner Perkins was interested in acquiring them
sounds like @kpcb couldn't cede power @FortuneMagazine http://fortune.com/... Eugene Berson / @bersonperson : Recruited 30000 people from across the country to use mobile phones that S23P tracks to see which apps are being used http://fortune.com/... Om Malik / @om : Buried in this @FortuneMagazine story is the news that @S23P raised a brand new $600 million fund. Congrats @mamoonha http://fortune.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes out a six-month arc that Fortune itself drove: the outlet first reported Kleiner Perkins' attempt to acquire Social+Capital Partnership in January, then reported in April that the deal fell apart because Social+Capital wanted to reorganize and run KPCB. Raising a $600M third fund is the answer to that standoff — Social+Capital chose independence and its own balance sheet over being absorbed into a larger franchise.
The story also carries a secondary signal buried in the coverage: Eugene Berson's panel of 30,000 tracked mobile users shows the firm was building proprietary data infrastructure alongside its fundraising, and Om Malik flagged the fund size as the real news inside the piece.
First-order effects
- Social+Capital enters its next investment cycle with $600M of committed capital and full control of its strategy, ending any near-term question of a Kleiner Perkins combination.
- Kleiner Perkins' consolidation play is definitively dead — it cannot buy its way into Social+Capital's portfolio and data operation, and must compete against it instead.
Second-order effects
- Talent, not M&A, becomes the integration path: by 2017, co-founder Mamoon Hamid had joined Kleiner Perkins as a general partner, moving the firms closer one person at a time after the merger failed.
- Kleiner Perkins doubles down on scale to defend its position, later raising more than $2B across two funds per Bloomberg's 2024 report — a bigger war chest aimed at the early-stage ground Social+Capital contests.
Third-order effects
- If the Hamid precedent is the template, venture consolidation happens through partner migration between independents rather than acquisitions, since founders with fresh funds have little reason to sell.
- The pattern points toward a two-tier structure: mega-funds competing on AUM while well-capitalized boutiques compete on proprietary data and founder access — with $600M positioned as boutique-scale, not mega-scale.
The trend: Venture firms are choosing independent fundraises over absorption by larger franchises, with consolidation arriving later through partner moves rather than deals.