Hummer Winblad Venture Partners is an American software and web focused

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

firm based in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for "Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. Its founders include John Hummer and Ann Winblad. The firm was an early investor in

Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sh ...

, the first popular file trading service, and in several internet firms that failed during the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Comp ...

History

First decade (1989–1999)

Ann Winblad started Hummer Winblad Venture Partners with former professional basketball player John Hummer after selling her company Open Systems and serving as a consultant to

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

, and IBM. The company originally focused on raising money from pension funds and investing in software companies. In 1999

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

invested in the company's venture fund. In her book ''The Kingmakers'', reporter Karen Southwick wrote that Hummer Winblad Venture Partners "may not be among the super tier of VC firms, but it certainly gets just about as much publicity."

Napster and the dot-com bubble (2000–2014)

In 2000 Hummer Winblad led a US$15 million round of funding for

while the internet company was being sued by the

Recording Industry Association of America The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors that the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/ ...

. ''The Economist'' noted that this investment was unusual for a company that previously had been "notably more risk-averse than most Silicon Valley rivals towards Internet investments." In 2001 several of the company's investments ended in company bankruptcies or closures, including

Pets.com Pets.com was a dot-com enterprise headquartered in San Francisco, US that sold pet supplies to retail customers. It began operations in November 1998 and liquidated in November 2000. A high-profile marketing campaign gave it a widely recognize ...

Homes.com Homes.com, Inc. is the fourth-largest real estate portal by traffic market share in the USA in 2023. Headquartered at 501 S. 5th Street Richmond, Virginia, United States, Homes.com maintains additional offices in Boca Raton, Florida; Tallahassee ...

eHow eHow is an online how-to guide with many articles and 170,000 videos offering step-by-step instructions. eHow articles and videos are created by freelancers and cover a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories. Any eHow use ...

, and Rival Networks. In 2006 Hummer Winblad Venture Partners settled a lawsuit brought by

EMI Group EMI Group Limited (originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records Ltd. or simply EMI) was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At the time of its break-up in 2012, ...

and

Universal Music Group Universal Music Group N.V. (often abbreviated as UMG and referred to as just Universal Music) is a Dutch– American multinational music corporation under Dutch law. UMG's corporate headquarters are located in Hilversum, Netherlands and its ...

after

's bankruptcy.

Rebranding as HWVP (2015–)

In 2015 Hummer Winblad Venture Partners rebranded as HWVP. The next year, for the first time, it raised a fund without Ann Winblad or John Hummer listed among the general partners. , its investments include Ace Metrix and

NuoDB NuoDB is a cloud-native distributed SQL database company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2008 and incorporated in 2010, NuoDB technology has been used by Dassault Systèmes, as well as FinTech and financial industry entities inclu ...

References

External links

* {{official, http://hwvp.com/ Financial services companies established in 1989 Venture capital firms of the United States Companies based in San Francisco American companies established in 1989 1989 establishments in California