Khosla Ventures, an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, recently completed twenty years in business. Passionate about technology-based economic disruption in many industries, the California-based firm invests in a range of areas, including AI, climate, sustainability, enterprise, consumer, fintech, digital health, medtech & diagnostics, therapeutics and frontier technology.
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Khosla Ventures’ early investments in companies leveraging AI, ML, biotechnology, and renewable energy have positioned it as a leader in identifying and capitalising on emerging trends.
The name is synonymous with almost all notable AI investments.
Founded by two prominent former Google researchers, Tokyo-based Sakana AI, reported to be Japan’s first AI startup, recently raised $30M in a seed funding round led by Lux Capital, with strong backing from Khosla Ventures.
London-based Limbic raised a $14m Series A round backed by Khosla for its AI chatbot therapist to take the product to US healthcare providers.
Sarvam AI, a GenAI start-up focusing on India’s unique needs, has also raised $41 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. The funding round marks the largest early-stage fundraiser for an Indian AI start-up. Home appliance firm Upliance.ai also raised $4 million in its seed round led by Khosla Ventures.
“We believe AI has the power to disrupt numerous economic models and change the way we lead our daily lives over the coming years. We invest in deep tech and invest where we can be early, bold and impactful” – Khosla Ventures
With investments in software giants like DoorDash and Block, the firm also backs Spiritus, a direct carbon air-capture startup, and Hermeus, a developer of hypersonic aircraft. In 2019, Khosla invested $50 million in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, making it the first outside investor in the company.
How It All Started
The firm was started in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to assist entrepreneurs in building impactful technology-based disruptive companies.
Khosla grew up wanting to become an entrepreneur despite being an Army kid with no business or technology connections. At 16, when he heard about Intel’s founding, he dreamt of starting his own technology company. He holds a BTech degree in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Upon graduation, Khosla co-founded Daisy Systems, the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers. The company achieved significant revenue and profits along with an IPO. Then, he co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 to build workstations for the software developers that helped Daisy Systems.
In 1986, Khosla joined KPCB as a general partner and built a semiconductor company named Nexgen, which Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) acquired. It was the only microprocessor producer to have significant success against Intel.
Finally, in 2004, his desire to be experimental and fund the ‘sometimes-imprudent science experiments’ led him to start Khosla Ventures, which focused on both for-profit and social impact investments.
Vinod is driven by the conviction that technology serves as a powerful catalyst to accelerate societal reinvention in food, health, climate, energy transportation, education, housing finance, media, retail and entertainment for billions around the globe. His greatest passion and deepest commitment lies in being a mentor to entrepreneurs who are building companies to tackle society’s largest challenges.
Vinod’s contributions extend beyond entrepreneurial mentorship. He holds a board position at Breakthrough Energy Ventures and serves as a founding board member of the Indian School of Business (ISB). Moreover, he is a charter member of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), a global non-profit network established in 1992, comprising over 40 chapters across nine countries today.
How It’s Going
As of October 2015, Khosla Ventures ranked among the top five largest and most active investors in the space sector, which has attracted over $10 billion in private capital since 2005. By September 2017, it managed approximately $5 billion in assets.
In October 2021, Khosla Ventures disclosed raising $1.4 billion in funding earmarked for investments in startups spanning early to late stages. This allocation included $400 million for seed-stage deals and $1 billion for later-stage companies. Additionally, in January 2022, Khosla Ventures secured $557 million for its first opportunity fund.
In 2023, defying the startup slump, Khosla closed in on $3 billion for venture funds. The fundraiser was one of the largest to be completed by a venture firm that year and one of the few to grow in size.
The Silicon Valley firm hopes to back more deep-tech companies tackling problems like healthcare and climate change. It supports startups in research-intensive sectors such as nuclear fusion and humanoid robots.
What’s Next?
Envisioning the future in a report titled, ‘Plausible tomorrows: 2035-2049’, Khosla Ventures made interesting future predictions including near-free AI doctors+tutors, Mach 5 flights, one billion programmers and so much more! All this shows that the firm is future-ready and is just getting started to make abundant, awesome, technology-based, ‘possible tomorrows’ happen.
