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 the recent closing of Insight.
As expected, Insight Partners announced Thursday that it closed another giant flagship fund, known as Fund XIII, along with its second fund Opportunity, 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, a $10 billion fund was rumored to be in the works. The Insight clearly achieved this objective, and then some. With this fund, it now has $90 billion in assets under management.
An Insight spokesman declined to disclose how many billions are in each new fund, but some of the money is also in what it calls a “dedicated buyout co-investment fund.” The spokesman said the money will be used to buy investments in software, an area established for the 30-year-old firm.
This increase signals that Insight has no intention of giving up the top dog spot to restart New York VC powerhouse Thrive. In 2024, Josh Kushner’s Thrive led and co-led many of the largest deals from OpenAI’s $6.6 billion round to Anysphere’s $100 million Series B, maker of AI coding assistant Cursor.
Insight is not giving up any ground. For example, the VC firm won co-leadership of Databricks’ record $10 billion fundraising deal in December, along with Thrive. To do this, it received funding from its Partners Public Equities fund, a fund designed to buy public stocks. This new capital will help him pursue, perhaps even close, more deals.
Interestingly, in a year where the closed IPO market means lagging returns for many VCs, Insight said it did well with its portfolio companies recording over $8 billion in exits in 2024, mostly through acquisitions. These include 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.
