Our Thoughts on Fund IX

We are proud to announce the closing of Spectrum Equity IX, a $1.5 billion growth equity fund, and $150 million in our Discretionary Overage Program. Having launched our fundraising earlier this year, the environment in which we closed Fund IX has been particularly tumultuous. Despite the volatility in the public markets and broader economy, our investors’ support has been unwavering, and we are profoundly grateful for their vote of confidence.

Most of our limited partners have been investors in Spectrum across multiple funds, and many have now been our partners for multiple decades. This continuity allows us to focus most of our time on our primary responsibility, identifying great companies in which to invest and managing a portfolio of dynamic, growing businesses.

In addition to our institutional investors, over 65 founders and executives from our current and past portfolio companies will be investors in this new fund. Spectrum’s reputation as a knowledgeable, collaborative and value-added partner is the lifeblood of our firm, and so we are honored to have their engagement and active participation as key stakeholders.

What may be most notable about our fundraising strategy is the relative lack of change. While the firm has significantly evolved over our 26 year history—having grown the number of investment professionals, expanded our resources, and invested in new approaches to value creation—our fund size has not increased materially since we raised $1 billion for Fund V in 2006. This is important to us culturally, as it allows us to remain single-minded in our pursuit of what we all love to do: help growth companies realize their ambitions by scaling into larger, more significant franchises. We are proud to have delivered strong returns to our partners across an increasing number of successive funds, but we do not take these results for granted. To that end, we have always viewed our discipline and focused strategy as a critical component of our success, and one which has enabled us to resist the siren call of raising dramatically larger funds.

It’s hard to know the magnitude or the duration of the COVID-19 impact on society and the broader economy, and we don’t pretend to know the likely shape of the recovery. However, we are as passionate as ever about the transformative potential of business models delivering software and information over the Internet. Our current portfolio has meaningful exposure to industry segments such as distance learning, enterprise collaboration and productivity, SMB enablement, delivery logistics, and telehealth. Several of our businesses are helping critical parts of our economy function remotely during this pandemic. And when we do begin to recover, we are convinced our portfolio companies will play an important role in driving our economy forward.

The consistency of our strategy has served our investors well for many years, through several market cycles. As we embark upon Fund IX, we are grateful for their support and excited for the opportunities that lie ahead.

For more information on Fund IX, see the press release.