Lightspeed Venture Partners doubles its growth practice

Lightspeed Venture Partners, a firm behind the likes of BetterUp, Aurora, Goop and dozens of others, will allocate more capital to mature companies with the hiring of three new partners.

Adam Smith, Amy Wu and Arsham Memarzadeh join the Menlo Park-headquartered venture capital fund’s growth practice. The team is led by longtime partner Will Kohler and Brad Twohig, who joined LSVP in 2018 to amp up the firm’s late-stage efforts, leading a $1.25 billion investment in Epic Games only months after arriving from Insight Venture Partners.

“I think we will continue to add to the team as we see the market opportunity ahead of us, so we can better understand when and where to invest,” Twohig tells TechCrunch. “They are going out and helping us identify interesting new opportunities. We are really looking for outlier businesses. We aren’t trying to invest in any company. We want outlier founders, outlying companies with outlying performance.”

The new hires double the size of LSVP’s late-stage team and come shortly after the firm closed on $1.8 billion for two new funds. Last year, LSVP announced Lightspeed Venture Partners XII, a $750 million early-stage vehicle, and Lightspeed Venture Partners Select III, a $1.05 billion fund for late-stage follow-on fundings.

Lightspeed, historically an early-stage fund, has continued to move downstream as deal sizes swell across all stages. With fresh capital to deploy, LSVP is not only continuing to invest in existing portfolio companies but also backing companies for the first time as late as the Series E.

“We still think there are great opportunities to make investments with a strong return profile even at the late-stage,” Kohler tells TechCrunch, citing the buzzworthy financial technology business Carta as an example. “[Carta is] an exceptional company even at a growth-stage investment because it has so much potential to keep growing. We are convinced there will be venture-sized returns.”

In addition to Carta, which LSVP invested in at its Series E earlier this year, Lightspeed has made late-stage bets on the B2B sales platform Seismic, employee coaching service BetterUp, Indian hotel business Oyo and Indian B2B wholesale marketplace Udon.

“Some time ago it might not have made sense for us to do this,” Kohler said. “But as we followed the growth of our early-stage companies, we’ve realized the markets are getting bigger, the global demand is impacting the size these companies can get and we can invest at an entry point that’s later on and realize a great venture return.”

Kohler emphasized the firm’s global funds — Lightspeed operates venture funds in China and India — as helpful mechanisms for late-stage deal sourcing. He also noted the firm’s expansion into late-stage is a “natural extension of its original vision.”

Founded in 2000, Lightspeed’s four founding partners — Chris Schaepe, Barry Eggers, Ravi Mhatre and Peter Nieh — “understood the boring non-sexy elements of tech,” Kohler explained.

As for the newest additions, Wu joins from Discovery Inc., where she was chief financial officer and senior vice president of the company’s global digital division. She will be focused on scaling businesses within LSVP’s portfolio.

Smith, focused on high-growth enterprise and consumer investment opportunities, previously worked as a principal at Bain Capital Ventures and a lead operations manager at Uber. Finally, Memarzadeh, who will invest in product-driven software startups, spent the last five years at OpenView, a Boston-based venture firm.