VC firms rarely reinvent themselves. Kleiner Perkins did—and has a new $3.5 billion to show for it

History has weight, and few know that better than the team at Kleiner Perkins. 

Throughout 2025, I spent several days inside Kleiner Perkins, interviewing partners, portfolio companies, and firm leads Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman about the legendary VC firm’s unlikely turnaround. 

I was the first journalist they’d opened up to in the better part of a decade. The history of venture capital is filled with firms that mattered once, but failed to enter a new era. Generally speaking, VC firms don’t turn around—they fade. Not so for Kleiner. During the course of reporting, I caught wind that Kleiner was out raising more capital, something that they confirmed this week, revealing the firm has raised a new $3.5 billion. 

As I wrote then: The firm has raised more than $6 billion in capital across several funds in the Hamid-Fushman era, and is currently raising more capital, a source familiar with the matter says. (Kleiner declined comment.) The rumored new round is expected to be slightly larger than Kleiner’s last round in 2024, which included the $825 million KP21 fund focused on early-stage investments and the $1.2 billion KP Select III, aimed at “high-inflection deals” (basically, follow-ons and deals with startups Kleiner has built relationships with).

Since I was reporting at the beginning of this year, things have apparently been going even better on the fundraising side for Kleiner than I was hearing back then. $3.5 billion is certainly more than “slightly larger” and obviously geared towards backing the AI boom. (Some of Kleiner’s AI investments include Harvey, Vlad Tenev’s Harmonic, Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, Anthropic, and Applied Intuition.)

It’s a long way from where this all started for Hamid, who was met with spectacular skepticism when he decided to join Kleiner about nine years ago. It went something like this, as I wrote back in January: 

Independently and immediately, a flood of people reached the same conclusion: This had to be a mistake.

​​It was the summer of 2017, and as word spread that Mamoon Hamid was joining venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, some people wondered if it was a joke, or “fake news.” And they didn’t hold back. 

“I got calls from friends in the venture business, other GPs [general partners] asking: ‘Are you sure this is happening? Is this real?’” Hamid recounts. “People kept asking: ‘What are you doing?’” 

It’s proof that no matter how much history you may have, there sometimes is, in fact, more story to be told. Read the full feature here.

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com