USV sticks to basics with a $166.8 million early-stage fund

Even in an uncertain market, top venture firms seem to have no trouble locking down huge capital commitments from their investors. This week, Accel announced $2 billion in funding. Last week, Lightspeed Venture Partners announced $1.2 billion across two new funds. GGV Capital is meanwhile raising two funds totaling more than $1 billion.

Union Square Ventures, the New York-based venture firm that has among the best track records in the business right now, has seemingly decided to stick with what it does best: invest in early-stage deals out of a comparatively much smaller fund. Specifically, according to a new SEC filing first spied by Fortune, the firm has just closed on $166.8 million, which is very much in the same ballpark as its last fund, closed in 2012.

At that time, USV had raised a separate, $175 million “opportunities fund” to make additional investments in its most promising portfolio companies. This time around, USV isn’t raising a similar side fund.

As Fortune notes, USV, which is run by five general partners — cofounders Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham, along with Albert Wegner, John Buttrick and Andrew Weissman — has an overall internal rate of return of 60.85 through last November, according to the University of Texas Investment Management Company (known as UTIMCO).

Some of USV’s best-known bets include Lending Club, which went public in 2013; Etsy, which went public last year; Tumblr, acquired by Yahoo in a $1.1 billion deal in 2013; and Foursquare, which raised new funding in a down round in January.

Wilson, who will be speaking at our upcoming Disrupt conference taking place in New York May 9 through May 11, recently railed publicly against companies that stay private for too long, saying of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in particular: “He’s wimping out. That should be a publicly traded company.”

Adding that Uber’s investors will want their money back at some point (USV is not among its investors), Wilson added: “You can’t just say f— you. Take the goddamn company public.”