Spark Capital

Spark Capital was founded in Boston by Santo Politi, Todd Dagres, Bijan Sabet and Paul Conway. Conway initially served as chief financial officer.⁠[1][2]

Spark invested in Tumblr at the Series A stage. Bijan Sabet served on its board from 2007 to 2013; Yahoo later acquired the company for $1.1 billion.⁠[3]

Spark led Twitter’s Series B financing. Sabet served on Twitter’s board from 2008 to 2011.⁠[4][3]

Santo Politi led Spark’s Series A investment in Oculus. Less than a year later, Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion.⁠[1]

Sabet announced a $375 million Spark Growth fund and Jeremy Philips’s arrival as general partner. A dedicated team in New York and San Francisco would invest in growth companies, including existing Spark holdings, businesses backed by other firms and companies without prior institutional financing.⁠[5]

Spark led autonomous-driving company Cruise’s Series A. General Motors acquired Cruise in 2016.⁠[2]

Spark led Discord’s Series C. Discord provides voice, video and text tools for community communication.⁠[6]

Spark and SVB Capital co-led Capitolis’s $40 million Series B, with Jeremy Philips joining the board on Spark’s behalf. Capitolis uses technology to help financial institutions collaborate and optimize capital usage and balance sheets.⁠[7]

Spark engaged Pentagram to revisit its brand and adopted a dog motif. Its website traces the concept to a 2017 presentation by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, emphasizing the partnership between the firm and entrepreneurs.⁠[4]

AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry announced a $450 million Series C led by Spark to support AI products and safety research. Spark general partner Yasmin Razavi joined Anthropic’s board in connection with the round.⁠[8]

An Axios correction reported $770 million for Spark’s eighth early-stage fund and approximately $1.5 billion for its fifth growth fund, totaling about $2.3 billion.⁠[9]

In February 2026, in a presentation publicly released by the Nebraska Investment Council, Spark listed $8.7 billion in committed assets under management across eight venture and five venture growth funds. The presentation labeled year-end 2025 figures preliminary and unaudited.⁠[10]

Spark announced through its official 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 account that it had closed $3.3 billion in new funds to continue backing companies from their earliest stages through growth.⁠[11]

Spark invests across consumer businesses, enterprise services, AI, frontier technology and fintech. Its website features portfolio companies including PlaidPlaidPlaid is a financial technology company co-founded by Zach Perret and William Hockey and headquartered in San Francisco. It provides infrastructure connecting financial accounts with applications, with products spanning account verification, payments, lending and fraud prevention, and develops AI models for financial transactions. A planned acquisition by Visa was terminated in 2021.Open the full entry, Anthropic, Discord, Ramp, Deel, Coinbase and Slack, spanning financial infrastructure, enterprise software and consumer products.⁠[12]

The February 2026 presentation described early-stage funds as focused on seed and Series A investments, usually with board seats. Growth funds focused on Series B and C, investing $25 million–$100 million per transaction. It described limited portfolio overlap between the two strategies.⁠[10]

The firm has early-stage, growth and operations teams, with offices in San Francisco, New York and Boston. Its website lists Politi as an early-stage general partner and Sabet, Conway and Dagres as partners emeriti.⁠[13][14][1][3][2][6]

Spark Capital: Official website: https://www.sparkcapital.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

X: https://x.com/sparkcapital (opens in a new window); LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/spark-capital-llc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15][14]