Benchmark

Early-stage firm known for its equal-partnership model and concentrated Series A investments.

Typical check size

$1M-$10M (stage-based estimate)

Founded

1995

Headquarters

San Francisco, CA

AUM

N/A

Rounds they lead

Series A

Rounds they invest

Seed Series A

Portfolio companies we track

Startups in our directory that list Benchmark as an investor (20 total).

11x AI digital workers for revenue teams — autonomous SDR Alice and voice agent Jordan.
Amplitude Product analytics and behavioral data platform for digital teams.
Anysphere Company behind Cursor, the AI-native code editor for software development.
Asana Work management and team collaboration software.
Boku Carrier billing and mobile payments for digital goods and app stores.
Cantina AI Social AI platform for persistent characters across voice, video, and text (Cantina).
Cerebras Wafer-scale AI chips and inference cloud — CS-3 systems and Cerebras Inference API for training and production LLM serving.
Cursor AI-native code editor (Anysphere) that forks VS Code for agentic programming workflows.
Cyngn Industrial autonomy company (NASDAQ: CYN) retrofitting forklifts with DriveMod AI.
Decart Real-time generative world models for gaming, robotics simulation, and physical AI.
Exa AI-native web search API built for developers and AI agents, not traditional search portals.
Here Not There Labs Builder of Towns — decentralized, E2E-encrypted group chat protocol for online communities.
Here Not There, Inc. Corporate parent of Towns protocol (Here Not There Labs) — decentralized community messaging.
Hipcamp Marketplace unlocking private land for camping, glamping, and RV stays.
Instagram Mobile photo-sharing app with filters and social graph — acquired by Facebook for ~$1B in 2012.
Optimizely Enterprise A/B testing and experimentation platform; acquired by Episerver in 2020, now the combined company brand.
Quora Q&A platform; Poe is a multi-model AI chat and bot-creation marketplace.
Reducto AI document-intelligence platform parsing PDFs and unstructured files for enterprise agents.
Sesame Conversational speech AI and AI glasses with sub-300ms response times.
Sierra Enterprise AI agents for customer experience—voice and text resolution with outcome-based pricing.

FAQs about Benchmark

Stage fit, check size, thesis, and how founders typically approach this firm — based on public sources and our directory.

Benchmark leads Series A rounds and selectively participates in Seed. Our directory shows Series A as the primary lead stage; the firm does not pursue growth-stage investing.

Benchmark raised a $425M eleventh fund (Forbes, 2024) and typically invests roughly $5M–$20M in Series A rounds for meaningful ownership. Exact sizing is deal-specific.

Offices in San Francisco and Woodside, CA. Benchmark is Silicon Valley–centric but has backed global category-defining companies; it remains highly selective and concentrated.

Benchmark is sector-agnostic within early-stage technology — consumer, enterprise, infrastructure, and AI — with a focus on contrarian insights and concentrated partnership attention.

Benchmark almost always leads Series A and takes a board seat. Its equal-partnership model limits portfolio size so each partner can engage deeply.

In our directory: Quora (/startup/quora), Sesame (/startup/sesame), Cursor (/startup/cursor), Cyngn (/startup/cyngn), Anysphere (/startup/anysphere), Here Not There, Inc. (/startup/here-not-there-inc).

Benchmark is among the most selective VCs — roughly a few new investments per partner per year. Warm introductions from trusted founders or investors are essential; cold outreach rarely works.

Benchmark-backed companies like Cursor appear across our a16z and AI coverage indirectly. See /fund/benchmark and startup pages such as /startup/cursor.

Website

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