Charles River Ventures
Charles River Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology. The firm was founded in 1970 to commercialize research that came out of MIT. Its name comes from the Charles River that starts in Hopkinton and divides Boston and Cambridge.History
The firm has raised over $4.3 billion since inception across 18 funds. Upon closing of the 16th fund, the firm rebranded to CRV. Prior to that, CRV XV, closed in February 2012 with $375 million of investor commitments. CRV's 14th fund raised $320 million of commitments.
In 2013, it purchased a large portion of the Pebble Smartwatch for 15 million dollars and is credited as the primary reason why Pebble was sold to Fitbit in December 2016. This netted Charles River Ventures nearly 40 million dollars.
Among CRV's portfolio companies are Airtable, Amgen, Aveksa, Blippy, Cascade Communications, ChipCom, Ciena Corporation, ClassPass, Continental Cablevision, Crushpath, DoorDash, Drift, Earbits, Fiksu, iBasis, Netezza, OneLogin, Parametric Technology Corporation, PillPack, Ring, SimpliVity, Sonus Networks, SpeechWorks, Stella, Stratus Technologies, Sybase, Twitter, Udacity, Vignette Corporation, Yammer, and Zendesk.
