NEA seeks to raise $3 billion fund, the largest since 2007

New Enterprise Associates, one of the venture capital industry’s leading fundraisers, wants to raise $3 billion in what would be the largest single venture fund raised since 2007, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This is NEA’s sixth fund of more than $2 billion.

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The Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.-area firm has now raised about $17 billion across 38 years of investing, making it one of the oldest and largest venture capital firms in the country. NEA is a multistage investor that backs health care and technology companies, from startups to businesses requiring significant amounts of capital to fuel growth. It invests in China and India as well as across the U.S.

NEA is attractive to large institutional investors because it can write a big check and get exposure to a range of sectors, geographies and investment stages across a single fund.

The new fund named in the filing, New Enterprise Associates 16 LP, comes two years after the company closed its 15th fund at $2.8 billion, the most it had ever raised for a single pool. It is also the first fund since NEA’s East Coast lead, Harry Weller, died suddenly in November at the age of 46.

NEA raised a co-investment fund for the first time in 2015, along with the main $2.8 billion fund. This $350 million fund was used to invest alongside the main fund in growth deals. Totaling $3.15 billion, the two pools exceed the largest single venture fund ever raised, which was Technology Crossover Ventures’ $3 billion fund ten years ago, according to industry tracker Dow Jones VentureSource.

The pool that closed prior to that, in July 2012, was $2.6 billion. Until 2015, the firm had always invested out of a single fund, unlike some of its competitors which have raised separate funds to invest overseas or in growth-stage deals.

NEA’s 13th fund, closed in 2009, had an internal rate of return of 19.58 percent, with most of its gains unrealized, as of September 2014, according to data from California State Teachers’ Retirement System.

Its 2003-vintage fund, NEA XI, had an IRR of 14.83 percent, according to Calsters. The pension fund had contributed $73.5 million to that fund and received $133 million in distributions as of September 2014.

Scott Sandell, 50, who joined the firm in 1996, joined Peter Barris as a managing general partner in 2015. Barris, 63, a technology investor who joined NEA in 1992, had been managing general partner for the past seven NEA funds.

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Sandell, leads NEA’s technology practice and investments in China from the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., office. He recently congratulated fellow general partner Chetan Puttagunta for being featured in Forbes Magazine’s 2017 30 under 30 All-Star Alumni List.

The other general partners in the new fund are Forest Baskett, Tony Florence, Mohamad Makhzoumi, Josh Makower, David Mott, Jon Sakoda, Pete Sonsini and Ravi Viswanathan.

This post first appeared on the Maryland Business News Wire, a service of UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism.