There have been several important milestones in General Catalyst’s 20+ year history. Today marks another one.
We’re delighted to announce the close of our $4.6 billion Fund XI–consisting of Creation ($800M), Ignition ($1.1B) and Endurance ($2.7B). This new fund family, together with our Health Assurance Fund which closed in March of last year, constitutes $5.2 billion of new capital. This represents our largest fundraise to date by far–and is the result of tremendous work by the GC team. It is a huge vote of confidence on the part of our LPs, and an opportunity to serve amazing founders around the world. We are grateful for both.
The $800M Creation fund allows us to place a renewed focus on company creation and productize that approach–working with entrepreneurs and execs to either hatch or fundamentally transform companies in our core areas of interest. GC’s hatch strategy has always been foundational to the firm, and was a driver of some of our notable early successes (Kayak, Livongo, Commure). Supported by our growing team of Executives-In-Residence, we intend to expand our efforts around original thesis development and company building.
Our $1.1 billion Ignition fund–which includes seed and early stage–will allow us to lean into our early stage roots and support company building wherever innovation is flourishing. The Ignition Fund will be focused primarily in the US and Europe, but we are also starting to invest in emerging and dynamic tech ecosystems elsewhere, including India. Ignition will continue to have a heavy focus on seed investing.
The $2.7 billion Endurance Fund will give us the ability to help companies that have had some early success and are already on their journey to becoming enduring businesses–in both private and public markets. We’ve recently added incredible bench strength to our endurance team, and can now provide better governance and guidance to these companies as they scale over time.
With this new fundraise, we’re hoping to capitalize our commitment to Responsible Innovation and to practice what we preach to founders: to build with greater intentionality; to embrace an inclusive mindset; and to work to deliver impactful outcomes.
We have the audacity to believe we can build enduring, market leading companies on the right side of history. We are proud of the scale we’ve achieved as a firm, but we’re more excited about the impact we can have in the world. We look forward to working with enlightened founders who share our vision for what is possible.
