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Shopify Investment Memo from Bessemer Venture Partners

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Shopify Investment Memo from Bessemer Venture Partners

Tl;dr: Bessemer Venture Partners invested in Shopify at the series-a round in 2010. Read to understand how a venture capital investor thinks about investing in a company and how they communicate it to their partners and potentially their limited partners.

About the VC investment memo

The memo was released on the Bessemer blog along with a number of other memos. There’s not more context.

About Shopify

Shopify is a cloud-based, multi-channel commerce platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Merchants can use the software to design, set up, and manage their stores across multiple sales channels, including web, mobile, social media, marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops. The platform also provides merchants with a powerful back-office and a single view of their business.

Shopify offers online retailers a suite of services including marketing, customer engagement, payments, and shipping tools to simplify the process of running an online store for small merchants. They launched an application programming interface (API) platform and App Store that allows developers to create applications for Shopify online stores and then sell them on the Shopify App Store.

The Shopify platform was engineered for reliability and scale, making enterprise-level technology available to businesses of all sizes. Shopify currently powers over 800,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries and is trusted by brands such as Tesla, Red Bull, Nestle, GE, Kylie Cosmetics, and many more.

Shopify was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

About Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer Venture Partners is a $4B venture capital firm that funds consumer, enterprise, and healthcare startups around the world, from seed stage to growth. Their partners help founders lay enduring foundations to create companies that matter, starting with seed and Series A investments and sticking with our companies at every stage of their growth. BVP funded the early stages of Pinterest, Blue Apron, Skype, Skybox Imaging, Twitch, and Periscope and helped build 117 IPOs including Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, Shopify, and Wix.

They did a $13.2m investment in the $21.2m BVP-led Series B.

Announced Date 
Transaction Name 
Number of Investors 
Money Raised 
Lead Investors 
Nov 15, 2017
Venture Round – SendGrid
1
Nov 30, 2016
Series D – SendGrid
4 $33M Bain Capital Ventures
Jul 6, 2015
Secondary Market – SendGrid
1
Apr 1, 2015
Secondary Market – SendGrid
1
Dec 2, 2014
Series C – SendGrid
3 $20M
Jan 17, 2012
Series B – SendGrid
7 $21.6M Bessemer Venture Partners
Apr 20, 2010
Series A – SendGrid
9 $5M Foundry Group
Dec 8, 2009
Series A – SendGrid
7 $750K Highway 12 Ventures
Aug 7, 2009
Pre Seed Round – SendGrid
2 $18K Techstars, Techstars Boulder Accelerator

Usual caveats

No investment memo made voluntarily public will ever be 100% as it was. The pressure is just too high for VCs to look smarter, and not make founders uncomfortable, etc. I highly praise the VCs that share their thought leadership so we can all learn.

If you’re learning to make a VC investment memo, don’t assume the memos are what you exactly need to do. Information will be redacted. Assume anything “delicate” or sensitive is not in the memos.

The only memo that is 1 to 1 is the Youtube memo because it was in a lawsuit.

Venture Capital Investment Memo

What do you think of the investment memo?

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