Spark Capital raises $3 billion new fund, hitting Anthropic with nearly 100x returns

Gate News: On March 10, venture capital firm Spark Capital is raising approximately $3 billion for a new fund, a 50% increase compared to two years ago. Spark is the first VC supporter of Anthropic, the developer of Claude, which led a $450 million Series C funding round earlier this year with an estimated valuation of about $4 billion. Anthropic’s latest valuation reaches $380 billion, and this investment has an almost 100-fold return. Yasmin Razavi, a general partner at Spark who led this investment, currently serves on Anthropic’s board. Spark’s 2022 Growth Fund (about $1.5 billion, including the Anthropic investment) is now worth four times the invested capital; its first growth fund in 2014 (nearly $400 million) achieved a 7 to 8 times return. This fundraising occurs amid a generally sluggish venture capital industry: according to PitchBook data, U.S. VC funding last year declined by 34% year-over-year to less than $68 billion. However, leading AI firms are expanding against the trend. Khosla Ventures, the first VC supporter of OpenAI, is raising over $4 billion, while Thrive Capital, a16z, and Lightspeed have collectively raised $34 billion in recent months, accounting for half of last year’s total U.S. VC funding.