Kleiner Perkins says it has raised a $600M fund, its first since the departure of Mary Meeker, focusing on seed, Series A, and Series B financings
“KP used to be a small team doing hands-on company building. We're moving away from being this institution with multiple products …
Context & Ripple Effects
This $600M vehicle is the first test of Kleiner Perkins' post-Meeker identity. The firm spent 2016 running a multi-product machine — SEC filings showed two new funds totaling $1.4B — but the edges of that structure kept breaking: the KPCB Edge seed program shut down in 2017 after all three of its partners left, and Mary Meeker has since decamped to Bond Capital.
The fund's stated design — one small team, seed through Series B, 'moving away from being this institution with multiple products' — is a deliberate contraction, and the related coverage shows it sticking: KP19 closed at $700M a year later with 30 of 34 prior investments at seed or Series A, before the firm eventually scaled back up with a $3.5B early-and-growth pair.
First-order effects
- Kleiner Perkins' LPs are now underwriting a single-product early-stage firm rather than a multi-fund institution, and founders at seed through Series B get the consolidated partner bench that used to be split across programs like Edge.
Second-order effects
- With Edge folded away and seed checks coming from the main fund, Kleiner Perkins competes directly at the earliest stages against firms like Sequoia — which per the related coverage still co-leads seed and Series A rounds — raising the bar for winning breakout deals.
Third-order effects
- If the concentration-then-rescale pattern holds, franchise venture firms cycle between focused early-stage rebuilding and renewed growth-stage expansion — exactly the arc the later fund sizes trace, from $600M here back up to a $2.5B growth vehicle.
The trend: Top-tier venture franchises are swinging between multi-product scale and concentrated early-stage focus, with each fundraise marking the next turn of that cycle.