Venrock Closes $450 Million Seventh Fund To Invest In Tech And Healthcare Startups

Long-running venture capital firm Venrock just closed its seventh fund, bringing in $450 million in new capital. The firm, which has been around since the ’60s and counts the Rockefeller family as one of its big LPs, will use the new money to continue investing in early-stage tech and healthcare companies.

The new fund comes four years after the firm raised its sixth fund, which closed at $350 million. Since then, the company has made a series of investments in health and tech startups, including companies like Zenefits, AppNexus, Doctor On Demand, Smartling, Dollar Shave Club, and Nest.

The firm’s also seen a fair amount of success of late from its investments. In the past five years, it’s had eight companies with more than $1 billion exits. In 2014 alone, it’s had five IPOs — most of which are on the healthcare side of its investments — and five M&A deals in its portfolio. That includes the $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest, Castlight Health going public this spring, and Bizo was just acquired by LinkedIn.

Roberts says the firm will likely make about 8-10 new investments per year from this fund, with plenty of room for follow-on investing. With offices in Palo Alto, New York City, and Cambridge, Mass., the firm has seven partners making investments in tech and healthcare.

It used to be that its investments in those verticals were fairly well divided, but nowadays most of the “healthcare” deals it’s looking at are driven by software, according to Venrock partner Bryan Roberts. As a result, the lines are blurring quite a bit between those worlds.

The firm is also looking to increase its investment in the New York startup ecosystem, as it has been expanding its presence their. Venrock hopes that by doing so it can tap into a growing number of data-driven startups cropping up in that area.

Of course, Venrock isn’t the only firm raising money recently. It seems like every VC firm has done a big new fund in the last eighteen months. But the firm’s deep history and a couple of big recent wins show that Venrock is not doing to bad, and is well positioned for the future.