Insight closes $675m fund

New York-based venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners has held a final close on its fifth fund with $675 million (€547 million) in total commitments.

Part of our strategy was diversifying the base into more pension and endowment money, which we hadn’t tapped before. Deven Parekh, managing director, Insight

According to Deven Parekh, a managing director of the firm, the fund’s original target was $525 million. Insight, which focuses on investments in the software and Internet services industries, closed its previous fund on $740 million in 2001.

Limited partners in Insight Venture Partners V include Goldman Sachs, HarbourVest Partners and Pantheon Ventures, all of whom previously invested with the firm according to Parekh. He added that Fund V attracted approximately twenty new investors out of a total institutional investor base numbering in the mid-forties.

“Part of our strategy was diversifying the base into more pension and endowment money, which we hadn’t tapped before,” notes Parekh.

Jeff Horing, co-founder, Insight

In addition to the fund closing, Insight announced the promotion of Michael Triplett and Jeffrey Lieberman, both six-year veterans of the firm, to managing director. Lieberman and Triplett join the firm’s five other managing directors, including co-founders Jeffrey Horing and Jerry Murdock. Triplett was previously an investment professional at Summit Partners while Lieberman had been a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.

Founded in 1995, Insight currently has more than $1.5 billion of capital under management. Robert Rubin, former Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration and current chairman of the Executive Committee of Citigroup, is a special limited partner of the firm.