Benchmark's Monster Uber Returns

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Emailed on May 10th, 2019 in The Friday Forward

Yesterday, Uber raised $8.6 billion in proceeds from its IPO (including a $500 million PayPal investment) at an initial market cap of $75.5 billion, and its fully diluted value just north of $82 billion.

Today is the first day of trading for Uber on the public markets. 

You can find a handful of stories on big wins for early investors like Chris Sacca, Jason Calacanis, and Naval Ravikant after a quick Google search, but the biggest winner is prolific Silicon Valley VC, Benchmark.

I'm going to keep this short, because the numbers speak for themselves:

  • Benchmark's stake in Uber, including prior sale of secondary shares to SoftBank, is valued at $7.65 billion. 

  • That investment was made out of a fund with $425 million, which was raised in 2011. 

  • All of VC fundraising for 2011 (whole US industry) was $24.7 billion. 


So... Benchmark returned the equivalent of 1/3 of all VC money raised in that vintage year, with one deal.

Sean Steigerwald