2012 was a big year for Bain Capital Ventures—the firm raised $600 million for new investments, and focused on expanding its newly launched operations into Palo Alto, under the direction of managing director Ajay Agarwal. Today, the VC firm is announcing a number of new investment partners, helping Bain accelerate its growth in Silicon Valley.
Matt Harris (New York), Todd MacLean (Silicon Valley And Boston), Salil Deshpande (Silicon Valley), and Jack Sweeney (Boston) are all joining (and in come cases, re-joining) the firm. Deshpande joins Bain from Bay Partners, and since 2006, has invested approximately $75 million into 20 companies. These investments center around two themes: open source and enterprise software infrastructure, and infrastructure and platforms around social graph APIs. Investments include Buddy Media, (acquired by Salesforce.com), SpringSource (acquired by VMware), Engine Yard, Lending Club (peer-to-peer lending), and others.
Harris, who is helping lead the New York office, previously co-founded and ran Village Ventures, where he invested in Dwolla, iSend, On Deck Capital, Simple, TxVia and Zipmark. We’re told he will be focusing a number of areas, but will be also actively seeking investments in the payments space.
MacLean, who is rejoining Bain Capital Ventures, was formerly a Partner co-leading Accel Partners’ Growth Fund. He’ll be focused on investing in SaaS, financial technology and information-based businesses. Sweeney brings plenty of enterprise expertise to the firm. He was formerly the CEO of Apparent Networks, was Vice President, Mergers & Acquisitions at EMC, and the President of Network Intelligence. He was also previously a General Partner at Prism Venture Partners.
Agarwal tells me that through a number of exits over the past three years, including Kiva Systems to Amazon, the firm has seen $1 billion of liquidity. And this translates into an expansion of the firm to solidify its place as a national presence in technology investing. The new staff also bring expertise for Bain in certain technology areas such as enterprise, payments, and more.