(Bloomberg) – Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms, has changed its regulatory landscape to expand its investment range – Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst moved from traditional VC Playbooks with similar moves from Sequoia Capital.
According to the Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Lightspeed has managed $31 billion in assets and has completed the process of becoming a registered investment advisor (RIA). The move is the culmination of a lengthy regulatory process and allows the company to invest more capital in assets beyond the direct initiation of equity. It also shows that most of the country’s largest venture capitalists now have ambitious ambitions, not just investing in startups.
Representatives for the company declined to comment.
Lightspeed is one of the last major venture capital firms to change its regulatory landscape as venture capitalists try to invest in a wider range of assets, including public and secondary stocks, as well as cryptocurrencies. Without RIA designation, venture capital firms can only allocate 20% of their capital to shares outside of traditional entrepreneurial interests.
The ambition of venture capitalists to expand their investments is nothing new, driven by the growth of the venture capital industry over time and the increasing competition for startups. This trend has accelerated recently, partly due to investors’ strong belief that AI will reshape a large number of businesses. Many companies adopt private equity-style summaries, buy or set up companies, and transform them through AI, rather than just investing in them.
“The traditional VC model is not the best position founder to transform the industry,” General Catalyst of RIA wrote in a blog post last year. Get the page from PE Playbook, the company is gaining a larger stake in startups and creating an AI-Native startup internally. It also recently launched a wealth management division and acquired Summa Health, a nonprofit health system last year, a very unusual step for a Silicon Valley company. The general catalyst no longer calls itself a venture capital company, but prefers the title “Global Investment and Transformation Company”.
Thrive Capital is another company that adopts some private equity strategies. Earlier this week, Thrive (also RIA) unveiled a new car called Thrive Holdings. Investment vehicles will allow them to start and acquire companies that can benefit from AI. Thrive raised about $1 billion for the work, according to the New York Times. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment.
Lightspeed’s investments include Humans and WIZ, and is expected to launch a new set of funds soon, Bloomberg reported. Like other venture capital firms, the scale of Lightspeed investments comes with it. In March, Lightspeed led a $3.5 billion investment in humans for chatbot developers, with a rating of about $60 billion.
Like many other venture capital firms, Lightspeed has recently narrowed its secondary deals, hiring a former managing director of Goldman Sachs Jack Fowler to manage the company’s secondary market strategy. Venture capital firms have invested more money to acquire stocks for secondary market startups because startups have longer private time. According to data from venture capital firm industry companies, more than $100 billion in assets in the secondary market are expected to be sold in 2025 from $25 billion in 2012.
Silicon Valley giant Andreessen Horowitz was one of the first VC companies to become RIA. Later, it introduced wealth management and participated in Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter. Many speculate that the next step for companies like Andreessen Horowitz is an initial public offering like Andreessen Horowitz, followed by PeookSteps like Peepteps of Blackstonds of Blackstone. However, the largest venture capital firm has not taken any official steps toward an IPO.
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