Khosla Ventures

In 2004, Vinod Khosla left the elite venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and founded Khosla Ventures. He started the new firm partly because he wanted to make an outsize bet on clean technology, particularly next-generation cellulosic biofuels made from plants and biowaste, which have lower carbon emissions than oil. In its first years, KV’s capital came primarily from Khosla himself.⁠[1][1][2][2]

Khosla calls his practice of assisting entrepreneurs as they build technology-based businesses “venture assistance”; since its founding, KV’s motto has been to prefer “brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness.”⁠[3][4]

In 2007, KV reached a deal with Dutch chemical engineer Paul O’Connor and launched KiOR, which used a catalytic cracking process to turn wood chips into biofuel; the company’s name was one of many four-letter names KV had trademarked in advance. KV partner Samir Kaul joined its board. KiOR was the “crown jewel” of Khosla’s biofuel portfolio: KV held 75% of its voting shares at one point and invested nearly $160 million, much of it Khosla’s own money; former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined its board.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

In September 2009, KV raised $1.1 billion for two new funds, with about $800 million for its third fund, Khosla Ventures III, and $275 million for a new seed fund. It was the first time KV had taken outside money, with the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) as the biggest new limited partner; it was also the biggest venture capital raise in two years at the time. KV then had eight partners, and former Facebook CFO Gideon Yu joined as a partner.⁠[2][2][2][2]

KV was then best known for clean tech investing, but clean tech made up only about two-thirds of its portfolio; its other investments included internet and software companies such as Jawbone, iLike, Slide, and RingCentral, and the new funds would continue to invest in both clean tech and information technology.⁠[2][2][2]

On July 1, 2010, representatives of KiOR, the state of Mississippi, and KV met to discuss a loan, with Khosla and then-Governor Haley Barbour both present. A few months later the state legislature passed a law providing KiOR with a $75 million loan; in return, KiOR promised to invest $500 million in the state, build three biofuel factories, use Mississippi-grown timber, and create more than a thousand direct and indirect jobs by the end of 2015. That same year, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair joined KV as a senior adviser, partly to counsel clean-tech startups.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In 2011, KV incubated the plant-based food company Impossible Foods with Stanford professor Pat Brown and became the company’s first investor, at a time when “alternative protein” was not yet an investment category.⁠[5][6]

In October 2011, KV closed its fourth fund, Khosla Ventures IV, at $1.05 billion. The fund was oversubscribed, with over 90% of commitments coming from existing limited partners, while former cornerstone investor CalPERS did not re-up; Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr personally invested in both the third and fourth funds. Khosla said at the time that KV’s funds had generated close to $1 billion in profits in total, and that its portfolio was split evenly between clean tech and internet and mobile.⁠[7][7][8][8][8][7][7]

KV was the first major venture capital investor in Square (later renamed Block), Jawbone, Lookout, and ZocDoc, and Khosla himself sat on Square’s board. Gideon Yu, who had led the Square investment, had already left KV, and in August 2011 it was reported that junior partners Alex Kinnier and Jim Kim had also left.⁠[7][8]

In 2013, former PayPal, LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry, and Square executive Keith Rabois joined KV for the first time. During his time at KV he led the first institutional investments in DoorDash, Affirm, and Faire, invested early in Stripe, and co-founded Opendoor; he later moved to Founders Fund as a general partner.⁠[4][9][9][9][9]

KiOR’s plant in Columbus, Mississippi, never delivered the yields it needed and was shut down at the beginning of 2014. In March of that year, KiOR disclosed that it had been subpoenaed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and that it did not know whether it could continue as a going concern; Khosla announced $100 million worth of equity commitments, including a contribution from Bill Gates, but this did not save the company. KiOR filed for bankruptcy in late 2014, by which time Mississippi had recovered only $6 million of its loan.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In January 2015, the state of Mississippi sued Vinod Khosla and others, alleging that they had known long before that KiOR had poor prospects but misled the state into lending it $75 million; Attorney General Jim Hood called it “one of the largest frauds ever perpetrated on the State of Mississippi.” Court filings for both Khosla and KiOR denied any fraud or deception. Khosla had previously acknowledged that at least half of his green-energy businesses would fail.⁠[10][1][1]

In June 2017, U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal in Houston approved a $4.5 million settlement for private shareholders of KiOR, to be paid by former KiOR CEO Fred Cannon, Khosla, and others, partially compensating about 23,000 shareholders; at that time, the Mississippi attorney general was still separately suing Cannon, Khosla, and others in state court, demanding repayment of $77 million plus interest.⁠[11][11][11][11][11]

In early 2019, KV invested $50 million in OpenAI, then still structured as a nonprofit organization, becoming its first venture capital investor and later holding a stake of about 5%. Khosla said that because of OpenAI’s unusual governance structure, the investment was “almost impossible to diligence,” but that it was the largest initial investment he had made in 40 years, larger by a factor of two than any before it.⁠[12][12][13][14]

KV had previously raised $1.4 billion for its seventh main fund and over $550 million for its first opportunity fund. In January 2023, KV disclosed in regulatory filings that it planned to raise about $3 billion across three new funds: $1.5 billion for an eighth main fund, $1 billion for a second opportunity fund, and $400 million for a new seed fund, which if completed would be its largest fundraise to date.⁠[15][15][15][6]

In November of that year, KV was close to completing about $3 billion across the three funds, including $500 million for the seed fund, $1.6 billion for the main fund, and $900 million for a growth fund, with plans to focus on research-intensive areas such as nuclear fusion, humanoid robots, and AI. KV completed 126 deals between the second quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, and after slowing in the second half of 2022, picked up its pace of investment again in 2023.⁠[16][16][16][16][16]

During the November 2023 episode in which OpenAI’s board fired and then reinstated Sam Altman as CEO, KV’s OpenAI shares were at risk for a time. Khosla later acknowledged that when KV invested, it had not discussed or considered that the nonprofit board, not Altman, really oversaw the for-profit enterprise; he said he had a close enough relationship with Altman that he figured there was no risk of this happening, adding, “I probably should have worried about it. But I didn’t.”⁠[13][13][13]

In January 2024, Keith Rabois left Founders Fund to return to KV. KV then set up a new office in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, and Rabois became KV’s first partner based in Miami.⁠[17][17][17]

In October 2024, KV disclosed in a regulatory filing that it had raised $405 million for OpenAI’s $6.6 billion funding round at a $157 billion valuation, at least about 6% of the round; however, most or possibly all of the money may have been pooled from other investors through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), and KV declined to comment.⁠[14][14][14][14]

In February 2025, KV set out to raise $3.5 billion across three funds, 17% more than its $3 billion in 2023: about half for its ninth core venture fund, plus a $1.1 billion growth fund for later-stage startups and a $650 million seed fund. KV then had five managing directors.⁠[18][18][18]

In July 2026, KV was in talks with investors to raise a new set of funds of up to $5.5 billion, which if completed would be the largest in its roughly 20-year history: about $1 billion for seed-stage startups, about $2 billion for slightly older companies, and a $2.5 billion opportunity fund for more mature companies. KV declined to comment, and the figures could still change.⁠[19][19][19]

On August 5, 2026, Discovery Loop, an AI company co-founded by Jeff Dean, who was leaving Google to start it, together with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, announced that its initial funding round was co-led by KV and Radical Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital participating; the amount and valuation were not disclosed. Vinod Khosla met the founding team at his Sand Hill Road office, on a Saturday so that no one would get a hint of Google’s loss of talent; he called it “the ultimate superstar team” and said that whereas humans had been using AI to do research, Discovery Loop would make AI itself the researcher.⁠[20][20][20][20][21][21][21]

As of October 2026, KV invests at the earliest stages, from pre-seed and seed to Series A, favoring large problems that are amenable to technology solutions and seeking “unfair advantages” such as proprietary technology and business model innovation; its funds are divided into a seed fund, a main fund, and an opportunity fund. Its investment areas include consumer, enterprise AI, fintech, frontier manufacturing and logistics, medtech and diagnostics, digital health, therapeutics, and sustainability.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

KV describes itself as having moved into several fields before they took shape: around 2009 it backed climate tech companies such as LanzaTech, around 2012 commercial space companies such as Rocket Lab and Skybox Imaging, and around 2015 it was an early investor in DoorDash and Instacart; it later invested in Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ Series A, GitLab, Rubrik, and others. Representative investments listed on its website also include Block, Stripe (growth stage), Affirm, and Sword Health.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][4][4][4]

As of October 2026, KV’s managing directors are Vinod Khosla, David Weiden, Keith Rabois, Samir Kaul, and Sven Strohband. Kaul and Weiden are founding partners: Kaul led investments in Guardant Health, Nutanix, Oscar, QuantumScape, and others, and Weiden invested in Okta, RingCentral, and Upstart; Strohband led early investments in GitLab, Rocket Lab, and others.⁠[22][23][23][24][24][25]

Khosla Ventures: Official website: https://www.khoslaventures.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

X: Public account: https://x.com/khoslaventures (opens in a new window)⁠[4]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/khosla-ventures (opens in a new window)⁠[4]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/khoslaventures (opens in a new window)⁠[4]