Jeff Horing’s Insight Partners is to New York venture capital what Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia are to Silicon Valley. And it’s a status that has been cemented with Insight’s latest closing.
As expected, Insight Partners announced Thursday it closed another giant flagship fund, known as Fund XIII, along with its second Opportunity fund, collectively $12.5 billion in new capital. An opportunity fund is generally money set aside to reinvest in existing portfolio companies when they raise new rounds.
In September, it was rumored to be working on a $10-plus billion fund. Insight clearly achieved that target, and then some. With this fund it now has $90 billion of assets under management.
An Insight spokesperson declined to divulge how many billions are in each new fund but part of the money is also in what it calls a “dedicated buyout co-invest fund.” The spokesperson said this money will be used for buyout software investments, an established area for the 30-year-old firm.
This raise signals that Insight has no intention of ceding the top dog spot to upstart New York powerhouse VC, Thrive. In 2024, Josh Kushner’s Thrive led and co-led many of the biggest deals from OpenAI’s $6.6 billion round to the $100 million Series B of Anysphere, the maker of AI coding assistant Cursor.
Insight isn’t ceding any ground. For instance, the VC firm won the co-lead of Databricks’ record-breaking $10 billion fundraising deal in December, alongside Thrive. It tapped into funds from its Partners Public Equities fund to do so, a fund set up to buy public stocks. This fresh capital will it help pursue, perhaps even lead, more deals.
Interestingly, in a year where the locked IPO market means lagging returns for many VCs, Insight said it did well with its portfolio companies logging over $8 billion on exits in 2024, largely through acquisitions. These included Recorded Future to Mastercard for $2.65 billion, Own to Salesforce for $1.9 billion, WalkMe to SAP for $1.5 billion, and Jama Software to private equity for $1.2 billion.
