More VC firms are seeking to raise new funds of $1B+ due to startups staying private longer, SoftBank as possible competition, avoidance of stake dilution, more
and not enough great teams and companies to put these sums of money into. http://www.axios.com/... Jason M. Lemkin / @jasonlk : “Even Sequoia Capital has seen its original Airbnb ownership fall from 20% to around 13%” http://twitter.com/... Shai / @shaig : some of these new larger funds are a directly related to the Softbank Vision fund & they are competing for dealsMost funds take 12+ years to deliver returns / DPI, it is going to be a long time before we know if any of these new larger funds look promising, even on a TVPI basis http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-way through a fundraising boom the corpus has been tracking: Dow Jones VentureSource counted 516 new US venture funds launched since 2013, with 2016's $44B the most raised since the dot-com crash. What changed by March 2018 is the size of the check being sought — $1B-plus vehicles — driven by three forces the coverage names directly: portfolio companies staying private longer, SoftBank's Vision Fund bidding up deals, and founders resisting dilution.
The dilution math is concrete: Jason Lemkin notes Sequoia Capital's original Airbnb ownership has slid from about 20% to around 13%, which is exactly what happens when late-stage capital arrives faster than a firm can recycle reserves. The later arc confirms the pattern stuck — Bessemer went on to close $4.6B across two funds in August 2022, its largest ever.
First-order effects
- SoftBank's Vision Fund resets the competitive floor: rival firms now need billion-dollar war chests simply to defend their pro-rata stakes in winners like Airbnb rather than watch ownership erode toward Sequoia's 13%.
- Founders gain leverage over governance — larger funds exist partly so investors can write big checks without demanding the board seats and control terms that earlier-stage money expected.
Second-order effects
- The line between venture and buyout blurs: within weeks of this report, Vista Equity Partners and Thoma Bravo were each lining up $10B-plus tech funds, chasing the same late-stage, stay-private companies the megafunds target.
- Non-traditional capital crowds in at the top of the market — by Q2 2021 non-VC funds were taking a record 42% of tech deal volume, competing directly with these enlarged vehicles for late-stage allocations.
Third-order effects
- Accountability gets deferred: as Shai notes, most funds take 12+ years to show DPI, so an entire generation of $1B-plus vehicles will be judged long after their deployment decisions are irreversible — a structural gap between capital raised and returns proven.
- If staying-private persists, the industry stratifies into small early-stage specialists and giant late-stage pools — the endpoint visible in 2026 coverage of Spark, Gigafund, and Greenoaks writing large checks while explicitly buying stakes without seeking influence.
The trend: Venture capital is consolidating into ever-larger funds built for companies that stay private for a decade or more, with SoftBank's Vision Fund setting the scale competitors must match.