CRV is a
venture capital
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...
firm focused on early-stage investments in technology. The firm was founded in 1970 to commercialize research that came out of
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
. Its name comes from the Boston area
Charles River
The Charles River (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ), sometimes called the River Charles or simply the Charles, is an river in eastern Massachusetts. It flows northeast from Hopkinton, Massachusetts, Hopkinton to Boston along a highly me ...
.
History
The firm has raised over $4.3 billion since inception across 18 funds. Upon closing of the 16th fund, the firm rebranded to CRV. Prior to that, CRV's 15th fund closed in February 2012 with $375 million of investor commitments. CRV's 14th fund raised $320 million of commitments.
In 2013, it purchased a large portion of
Pebble Technology for $15 million and is credited as the primary reason why Pebble was sold to
Fitbit
Fitbit is a product lining, line of wireless-enabled wearable technology, physical fitness monitors and activity trackers such as smartwatches, pedometers and monitors for heart rate, quality of sleep, and stairs climbed as well as related soft ...
in December 2016. This netted CRV nearly $40 million.
In 2024, CRV returned 275 million dollars from the 500 million it had raised in its current fund back to investors, stating that their focus would shift away from late-stage investments and toward the early stage.
Among CRV's portfolio companies are
Aveksa, mabl,
OneLogin
OneLogin, Inc. is a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) provider that develops a unified access management (UAM) platform for enterprise-level businesses and organizations.
History
OneLogin was founded in 2009 in San Francisco by Tho ...
, Stella,
Sybase
Sybase, Inc. was an enterprise software and services company. The company produced software relating to relational databases, with facilities located in California and Massachusetts. Sybase was acquired by SAP in 2010; SAP ceased using the Syba ...
,
Yammer
Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) is an enterprise social networking service that is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. It is used mainly for private enterprise social software, communication within organizations but is also used for net ...
, and
Zendesk
Zendesk, Inc. is an American company that provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) products related to customer support, sales, and other customer communications. The company was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2007 and is headquartered in San Fr ...
.
References
Venture Firm Is Giving Loans a Try The New York Times, November 1, 2006
The New York Times, July 12, 2004
External links
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Venture capital firms of the United States
Financial services companies established in 1970
1970 establishments in Massachusetts
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