Bain Capital Adds Five New Partners To Boost Growth In Silicon Valley

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Bain Capital Ventures is staffing up its team at a time when venture capital industry seems to be contracting. Bain Capital is already expanding its new operations, Palo Alto, which is located California, under the guidance of Ajay Agarwal as its managing director. The firm is known for backing companies like LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD), SurveyMonkey and Kiva Systems.

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Among the five new investment partners, four joined the company in the last 12 months. Salil Deshpande, who worked as general partner at Bay Partners, will manage Bain Capital’s Silicon Valley office. Todd McLean, who worked as a Bain Capital Ventures investor before leaving the firm in 2010 to join the growth equity unit of Accel Partners. Matt Harris is a co-founder of Village Ventures. The fourth new investment partner is Jack Sweeney, who was the CEO of cloud software firm Axeda. Sweeney is new to the venture capital industry, and he will work out of the company’s Boston office.

All the four new partners have some past connection with Bain Capital Ventures. Jack Sweeney was the CEO of two other startups financed by Bain Capital. The company also promoted Ben Holzman to investment partner.

Managing Director Ben Nye was named the venture capital’s second co-managing partner, along with Mike Krupka. After the new additions and promotion, the 33-person investment team has 11 partners.

Jeff Schwartz, a long-time managing director of Bain Capital, and one of the original partners of the firm, announced his intentions to retire by the end of this year in order to spend more time with his family. Schwartz said he will keep working with three or four portfolio firms till the end of 2013, but rejected the idea of taking any new board seats.

The five new partners have a common focus on software and enterprise – where Bain has invested about 80 percent of its money, according to Ben Nye. Last year, the Boston-based venture capital closed a $600 million fund, of which 25-30 percent capital has been deployed so far.

In 2012, Bain Capital’s venture team distributed about $400 million through exits. It sold Kiva Systems to Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), AppAssure Software to Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) and sold a partial stake in SurveyMonkey.

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