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Exclusive: Two decades in, DFJ Growth raises $1.2 billion for its fifth fund and doubles down on the long game

  • May 13, 2025

DFJ Growth was founded between two ends of the world.

In 2005, tech was starting to shake off the dotcom bubble burst, while global business as a whole was careening towards 2008 and the Great Financial Crisis. And somewhere in Silicon Valley, Barry Schuler and Randy Glein—along with venture capital pioneer John Fisher and industry veteran Mark Bailey—were thinking about the decades to come. Their thesis was this: To fill the gap between early-stage VC and the public markets, raise a “growth” fund that helps companies stay private longer and mature before going public.

This is now, of course, the standard thesis for growth funds in VC as we currently understand them. But back in 2005, it was a slightly hare-brained idea. Though there was a mounting history of VCs investing in more established startups that had already achieved product-market fit, Schuler, Glein, Fisher, and Bailey believed that companies were going to stay private a lot longer than anyone had seen in the past—a funky idea at a time when Google had gone public just the year before, after raising only a Series A.

"When we went out to raise the first fund, it was really hard explaining what we were setting out to do,” said Schuler, who had been the CEO of AOL before becoming a VC. “It would be: ‘Tell me again, are you talking about growth equity? What are you talking about?’”

“When we were telling our prospective investors for that first fund,” Glein added. “‘We’re going to find companies that will be worth $1 billion or more,’ they’d start counting on their fingers: ‘How many of those have there been in the last five years?’”

This was eight years before Aileen Lee would coin the term “unicorn.” Bill Goldsmith, founding and managing member of Nantucket Multi-Managers, has been an LP in DFJ Growth since 2006—across all five funds—and remembers just how curious an idea it was back then.

“If you look at a company like Microsoft—it went public in 1986—the vast, vast majority of the value creation in Microsoft has occurred after it went public,” said Goldsmith. “And DFJ’s thesis that was going to change was a very, very differentiated point of view at the time…It piqued my curiosity, and was a very prescient call I might add, since that’s exactly what’s happened since 2006.”

What was a curiosity became a tectonic shift, and Schuler and Glein are still working together 20 years later as cofounders and managing partners at DFJ Growth. The firm has raised its fifth fund at $1.2 billion, Fortune can exclusively report. The fund was originally set to be $800 million, the firm says, but expanded to meet demand. Though $1.2 billion is a massive step away from the firm’s first fund in 2006, much remains the same. (DFJ Growth takes its name from the legendary early-stage venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, from which it spun out at its founding. The firm retained the DFJ name in part to reflect its continued connection to founding partner Fisher.) For two decades, DFJ Growth has consistently raised on four-year cycles, give or take, much longer than the more common two-year cycles.

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