DFJ

Draper Fisher Jurveston is a Draper Fisher Jurveston is a venture capitalventure capital firm making seed, venture, and growth investments in technology companies operating within enterprise and consumer-focused industries. firm making seed, venture, and growth investments in technology companies operating within enterprise and consumer-focused industries. Draper Fisher Jurveston has made capital investments in 27 companies who have exited at greater than $1 billion each. Notable companies include are Baidu, Hotmail, Twitter, and Skype.

The company invests in early-stage and late-stage startups. It has two separate teams dedicated to the early (venture) entities and late-stage (growth) companies. It also aids entrepreneurs with recruiting, business development, and partnering. DFJ focuses on startups that create disruptive technologies in fields such as commercial space exploration, robotics, and sustainable transportation.Fields such as neuroscience and communications have also been added to the company's portfolio.

DFJ was founded in 1985 by Tim Draper. John Fisher became a partner in 1991 and Steve Jurvetson joined in 1994.

In 2013, founding partner Draper announced his departure from future DFJ Venture funds, with John Fisher continuing in his role with DFJ Growth. Draper announced he will continue investing out of an early stage venture fund Draper Associates V and assisting his son in running an incubator.

As of October 2015, DFJ is one of the six largest and most active investors in the space sector, which has had over US$10 billion of private capital invested in it since 2005.

In November 2017, Steve Jurvetson stepped down from his position at DFJ after allegations of sexual harassment.

DFJ Growth's investments include Anaplan, Coinbase, Cylance, Ring, Sisense, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Unity, and Yammer

Databook – the market and technology leader in consultative sales intelligence – recently announced that it has secured $50 million in Series B funding. And the oversubscribed round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from DFJ Growth and previous investors Threshold, Microsoft’s Venture Fund M12, Salesforce Ventures, and Haystack.

This funding round will be used to accelerate hiring across all areas of the business and support growth into Europe and APAC including new industries such as banking, telecommunications, and consumer goods.

And the funding round comes at a time of explosive growth for Databook as enterprises around the world embrace the company’s AI-powered platform to simplify strategic selling. And Databook’s client base currently generates more than $300 billion in sales revenue each year and represents 50% of the total enterprise software sellers in the world. In the last two years, the company has seen a 27x increase in valuation as more businesses utilize its platform to empower go-to-market teams with account-specific insights and accelerate sales success.

Databook has also made a series of strategic executive appointments in the past year in preparation for its next phase of accelerated growth. And this includes CTO Neil Smith, who joined from Google where he led the Research and Machine Intelligence group focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and SVP of Product Tamar Shor, who joined from Treasure Data, the market-leading enterprise customer data platform. Plus other recent executive appointments include technology veterans from leading enterprises who define global business success including Accenture, Salesforce, and Oracle.

As customers are spending more time in online channels, digital selling has become even more critical to the enterprise. And a recent Harvard Business Review article noted that sales success requires tailoring connections at every step of the buying cycle based on the knowledge and preferences of buyers, which are rapidly evolving.

To date, most account-based sales and marketing technologies have focused on intent data, list development, and targeting, but fall short of supporting the development of strategic insights, relevant business use cases, and personalized content needed to sell solutions to executive buyers. And 88% of salespeople say current economic conditions make it important to anticipate customers’ needs. Databook uniquely solves this challenge by providing every rep with the user-friendly tools they need to become valued, strategic advisors to their client – with the click of a button.

This Databook platform integrates AI- and NLP-driven technology to create a unique account and solution-specific insights with the same level of relevancy and value provided by professional consulting firms. And using this intelligence, the platform connects the dots for sales and revenue teams by serving up custom content needed for account planning, executive preparation, value architecture, ABM and customer presentations. On average, sales teams using Databook achieve 3x more pipeline, 2.5x larger deals and 1.5x faster cycle times.

Along with its rapid growth in sales, the company has made a commitment to DEI as it looks to scale its team over the next year. Already a diverse team, 38% of the company, 56% of the leadership team, and 40% of the board of directors is comprised of traditionally underrepresented communities in technology.