Meet the Venture Capitalists · Firm Profile
Kleiner Perkins
One of the founding firms of the industry. Its own publishing announced a return of focus to early stage investing, with a separate Select vehicle for follow-on and growth-stage opportunities.
Criteria: Publishes notably less criteria language than its peers. Structurally, the first check and the scaling capital come from different vehicles, which is worth understanding before modelling later rounds.
What this means for your pitchExpect a partner-driven, decisive process rather than a slow committee, which means the quality of one partner relationship matters more than breadth of coverage across the firm.
Recent 2026 fund figures reported secondhand and unverified; deliberately omitted.
Firm publishing and fund announcements. Checked 16 August 2026
From Kleiner Perkins's own site and announcements · checked 26 August 2026 · selective, not comprehensive · verify on the firm's pages
In August 2026, Kleiner Perkins announced an investment in Etched, a semiconductor company founded in 2022 that builds purpose-built silicon and rack-scale systems for AI inference. The firm states Etched has more than $1 billion in signed customer contracts, with Jane Street as its first production customer.
In July 2026, Kleiner Perkins announced it co-led a Series B for CuspAI, an AI materials discovery platform where users specify desired material properties and the system searches, generates, and simulates candidate materials. The firm states CuspAI identified 20 candidate materials for PFAS removal in a collaboration with Kemira.
In June 2026, Kleiner Perkins announced an investment in Sail Research, an inference platform for long-horizon, asynchronous AI agents founded by Neil Movva and Samir Menon. The firm states agent workloads consume orders of magnitude more tokens per task than traditional inference.