Pelion is excited and grateful to share that we’ve raised $500m for our 8th venture fund. As a part of the announcement, we thought it would be fun to share a little about our firm’s history, what we plan to do with the funding to serve the entrepreneurs we partner with in Utah and beyond, and why we are so excited about the opportunity ahead.
Many people don’t know this, but Pelion was actually founded by Jim Dreyfous in 1986 as “Utah Ventures.” It wasn’t until 2010 that we rebranded to Pelion. Like all firms, the early days of Pelion were full of many ups, downs, and uncertainties. Our early focus was split across medical devices and software, but after seeing the early potential of software the firm decided to focus there, and eventually partnered with incredible businesses like Fusion-IO, Riverbed Technologies, and many others.
Early on, we often felt like we had to sell “around” Utah to our potential LPs, who were uncertain that a real tech ecosystem could thrive here. But as Utah’s ecosystem has grown exponentially, the narrative has completely shifted: some of the world’s best LPs now see Utah as an ecosystem that can produce many billion-dollar startups, and they are excited to support it.
We believe something special is happening in Utah. In our two most recent funds, we’ve found that about 50% of our investments have a Utah tie (Divvy, LVT, Nursa, Neighbor, Redo, Torus, and many others) and we expect that trend will continue with Fund 8. If you look back at the history of Utah tech, there have been 4 distinct waves, with each wave growing on the last:
As we kick off 2025, we believe we are at the start of the biggest wave yet: Wave 5. One interesting fact is that if you look at the number of startups and the amount of funding in Utah today, it roughly matches the amount of funding and startups in Silicon Valley around 25 years ago. Silicon Valley was made special by a confluence of university talent, early exits that created new angel investors and executives, and anchor venture funds to feed the flywheel. We believe the ingredients for Utah are all here to have a similar 25 year run: we have multiple universities with world-class talent, we have dozens of company exits who have created hundreds of executives and angel investors, and we have many great firms along with Pelion committed to growing the ecosystem.
We are committed to backing exceptional founders and companies. Like previous funds, Fund 8 will focus on leading series A rounds in exceptional startups. We also have a seed program to support founders at the earliest stages, and we will invest at the Series B and C round as well. We have made several investments out of Fund 8 already:
We are especially grateful to our LPs, most of which have been partners to us for many years across many funds. Pelion also has a sleeve of our fund that we call the “Entrepreneur Fund”, which allows executives and founders in our portfolio to invest smaller amounts and help us source great deals and support other founders.
As we look forward to Wave 5, we couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity ahead. We believe that there will be once in a generation companies built in the next several years - in Utah and beyond. Our goal is to partner with the world’s most ambitious founders and to serve them as they try to pull off the impossible. If that’s you, reach out!
