When I ask most venture capital firms about who their limited partners are, or the investors supplying the money for their funds, I get the same cryptic response: endowments, pension funds, family offices, and high net worth individuals. It’s a closely guarded secret for most VC operations. The New York-based Lead Edge Capital takes a different approach: It proudly lists the more than 700 individuals who back its fund right on its website, though it doesn’t include its institutional backers.
The sheer number of LPs is a staggering figure for any venture firm, and especially one with a relatively modest $5 billion of assets under management. But Nimay Mehta, Lead Edge’s managing partner, swears by the strategy, even as he gears up to raise the firm’s seventh fund this year, which will entail more than 700 calls. He affectionately referred to the labor-intensive process as “an insane amount of brain damage.” But in the increasingly competitive field of software investing, it’s what sets Lead Edge apart from its peers.
Mehta is well accustomed to the challenge of picking up the phone. He comes from the Insight Partners mafia—another New York venture giant that helped pioneer a bottom-up approach to sourcing, in which early-career analysts find deals through cold outreach.
Mehta was a Harvard undergraduate in 2007 when he saw a job listing at an entrepreneurship club for a part-time internship at General Catalyst. He cold-called the person who put up the listing and got the job: an unglamorous position paying about $15 hourly devoted to putting leads in a database, as he recalls. He moved to New York in the fall of 2009, with the financial crisis raging around him, and parlayed his experience at GC into an analyst position at Insight, joining the “dialing for dollars” team, as he put it. “It’s some of the best training you can get in investing,” Mehta told me about cold calling startups. “Your love and appreciation for really great businesses was entirely born out of talking to bad companies.”
“It’s like going to the gym,” he added. “Every single phone call is a rep.”
During his time at Insight, Mehta was introduced by a classmate to a former Bessemer analyst who was starting a venture firm and looking to make his first hire on the investment team. Mehta joined in May 2011, and Lead Edge launched its first fund the next month.
While Lead Edge does still raise around 50% of its capital from institutional investors, 95% of its limited partners by logo are individuals—and that was part of the initial design of the firm. Lead Edge wanted to build its LP base around people who could be helpful to its portfolio companies. “It was really a function of just my sourcing experience and having spoken to so many founders and CEOs myself,” Mehta told me.
The number also ballooned over the years, from around 100 LPs in the first fund to 750 today—a who’s who of Fortune 500 executives, entrepreneurs, and advisors to major companies, from the former CEO of Macy’s to the CFO of Workday. “Building a firm like ours is like trying to get a satellite into orbit,” Mehta says. “Objects in orbit stay in orbit, but getting them to orbit is really, really hard to do.”
He points to Lead Edge’s growth investment in the tax software company SafeSend in 2021 as an example of the strategy’s success. After the firm acquired a 65% stake in the platform, Lead Edge asked its LPs to demo the software to their accountants, which resulted in millions of revenue. Lead Edge sold the business to Thomson Reuters for $600 million earlier this year. Other notable exits for the firm include Asana and Uber.
While many venture firms are struggling to win the attention of LPs amid a continued liquidity crunch, Mehta argues that Lead Edge’s unique approach helps foster close relationships with its backers—he says the firm retains 95% of those backers between funds. That can also be attributed to the firm’s returns—Mehta says Lead Edge’s first five funds measure in the top quartile on a DPI basis, a commonly used metric in venture capital for the amount of money returned to investors.
The bigger question for the firm, especially with its Insight and Bessemer DNA, is size. Lead Edge is a fraction of the size of its progenitors, with around 80 people on its team. Still, it is trending in their direction, with the goal of raising an even larger fund than Lead Edge’s sixth, which totaled nearly $2 billion. When I asked Mehta whether his goal is to reach Insight’s scale, he gave a diplomatic answer: “My ambition is great returns.”
Though Mehta insisted that Lead Edge doesn’t have a master plan, the firm’s army of backers is only growing, especially as its portfolio executives have successful outcomes and join the LP base—70 in total. “That’s the flywheel,” he says.
Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS
- OX Security, a New York City-based application security company, raised $60 million in Series B funding. DTCP led the round and was joined by IBM Ventures, Microsoft, Swisscom Ventures, Evolution Equity Partners, and Team8.
- Grüns, a Beaverton, Ore.-based nutritional gummy company, raised $35 million in Series B funding from Headline.
- Sett, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based agentic AI platform for mobile gaming studios, raised $27 million in funding from Bessemer, F2, Saga VC, VGames, and Akin Babayigit.
- Inductive Bio, a New York City-based developer of AI models for small molecule drug discovery, raised $25 million in Series A funding. Obvious Ventures led the round and was joined by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Lux Capital, S32, Character, and Amino Collective, and angel investors.
- Relevance AI, a San Francisco and Sydney, Australia-based AI agent creation platform for companies, raised $24 million in Series B funding. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round and was joined by existing investors King River Capital, Insight Partners, and Peak XV.
- WisdomAI, a San Francisco-based agentic data insights platform, raised $23 million in funding. Coatue Ventures led the round and was joined by Madrona, GTM Capital, The Anthology Fund, and angel investors.
- Carta Healthcare, a San Francisco-based provider of AI-powered clinical data abstraction, raised $18.3 million in Series B1 funding. UPMC Enterprises led the round and was joined by MemorialCare Innovation Fund, Rex Health Ventures, Tampa General Hospital Ventures, and existing investors Memorial Hermann Health System, Frist Cressey Ventures, Storm Ventures, Paramark Ventures, CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, and Mass General Brigham Ventures.
- Onebeat, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based inventory optimization company, raised $15 million in funding. Schooner Capital led the round and was joined by Magenta Venture Partners, Surround Ventures, AnD Ventures, J-Ventures, and INcapital Ventures.
- Posha, a San Francisco-based developer of an AI-powered home booking robot, raised $8 million in Series A funding. Accel led the round and was joined by existing investors Xeed Ventures, Waterbridge Ventures, and more.
- Alice.Tech, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based AI-powered study assistant, raised $4.8 million in seed funding from Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator, and angel investors.
- Gardin, an Oxford, U.K.-based developer of a remote plant insights monitor, raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Navus Ventures led the round and was joined by Oxford Innovation Finance and existing investors LDV Capital, MMC Ventures, Seedcamp, Alchimia Investments, and angel investors.
- Tesseral, a San Francisco-based open source authentication infrastructure for business-to-business (B2B) software companies, raised $3.3 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham (YC co-founders), Calvin French-Owen (co-founder and former CTO of Segment), Steve Bartel and Nick Bushak (co-founders of Gem), and Mike Wiacek (founder of Stairwell).
PRIVATE EQUITY
- TPG will acquiree a majority stake in AvidXchange, a Charlotte, N.C.-based provider of accounts payable automation software and payment solutions for middle market businesses and their suppliers, and Corpay agreed to acquire a minority stake in the company, for $10.00 per share and a total of $2.2 billion.
- Novopor Advanced Science, a portfolio company of Bain Capital, acquired Pressure Chemical Company, a Pittsburgh, Penn.-based provider of high-pressure and specialty chemistry services. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- Safety Marking, a portfolio company of Highview Capital, acquired Straight Line Industries, a Cohoes, N.Y.-based roadway striping services subcontractor. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- TZP announced a majority recapitalization of Superscapes, a Carrollton, Texas-based commercial landscaping company. Financial terms were not disclosed.
EXITS
- Astorg agreed to acquire a majority stake in Solabia Group, a Paris, France-based biotechnology ingredients manufacturer, from TA Associates. Financial terms were not disclosed.
