Sources: Mary Meeker is seeking to raise around $1.25B for her new growth fund
- The famed tech investor Mary Meeker is aiming to raise about $1.25 billion for her new growth fund, multiple sources tell Business Insider. — Meeker, a longtime partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers … Thanks: @stevetweedie
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands two months after Mary Meeker and three partners walked out of Kleiner Perkins, with sources describing clashes between the firm's early- and late-stage groups as the trigger. The $1.25B target she is now shopping to limited partners is the first hard number attached to that split — a fund sized to keep her growth-stage franchise intact outside the firm she spent years at.
The arc resolves quickly in the related coverage: the vehicle becomes Bond Capital, which closes more than the targeted amount for its debut fund, while Kleiner Perkins regroups around a $600M fund focused on seed through Series B. The episode matters because it tests whether a marquee investor's brand can carry standalone fundraising at scale.
First-order effects
- Meeker's four-partner team gains independence over its own pool of growth-stage capital, no longer sharing deal flow or carry with Kleiner Perkins' early-stage investors.
- Kleiner Perkins is immediately left without its flagship growth practice, forcing it to define itself as an early-stage shop while its best-known partner raises against it.
Second-order effects
- Limited partners face a choice between backing the spinout and staying loyal to Kleiner's successor funds — and the later close above target suggests the spinout won that allocation contest.
- Kleiner's response, a smaller fund explicitly scoped to seed, Series A, and Series B, formalizes the early/late split inside one formerly full-stack franchise rather than fighting to rebuild the growth arm.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, dedicated growth vehicles become the default structure for star investors — a path later validated when Benchmark, decades into early-stage-only investing, raised its own $1.25B late-stage fund.
- The industry drifts toward specialization by stage, with brand-name investors monetizing their names through standalone funds and LPs allocating across a barbell of seed specialists and growth specialists instead of generalist firms.
The trend: Top venture franchises are splitting early- and late-stage investing into separate branded firms, with limited partners funding each side of the barbell independently.