Mayfield Fund is one of the oldest venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 firms in the US, focusing on early-stage to growth-stage investments in information technology

Information technology

Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

 companies with a focus on enterprise software

Enterprise software

Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software , is software used in organizations, such as in a business or government, contrary to software chosen by individuals...

, Internet consumer & media services, and communications

Telecommunication

Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...

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The firm was founded in 1969 by Thomas J. Davis, Jr.

Thomas J. Davis, Jr.

Thomas Jefferson Davis, Jr. was an early Silicon Valley venture capitalist and founder of the Mayfield Fund.As Vice President of Kern County Land Company from 1957 to 1961, he managed its investment in four new companies including Watkins-Johnson Company, which investment of $900,000 was sold in...

. Since inception, the firm has raised over $2.8 billion of investor commitments across 13 private equity funds. The firm is headquartered on Sand Hill Road

Sand Hill Road

Sand Hill Road is a road in Menlo Park, California, notable for its concentration of venture capital companies. Its significance as a symbol of private equity in the United States may be compared to that of Wall Street in the stock market...

 in Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...

 and was one of the earliest venture capital firms to locate in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...

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Among the firm's most notable investments include Compaq

Compaq

Compaq Computer Corporation is a personal computer company founded in 1982. Once the largest supplier of personal computing systems in the world, Compaq existed as an independent corporation until 2002, when it was acquired for US$25 billion by Hewlett-Packard....

, Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...

, 3COM

3Com

3Com was a pioneering digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network infrastructure products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney, Bruce Borden, and Greg Shaw...

, Amgen

Amgen

Amgen Inc. is an international biotechnology company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. Located in the Conejo Valley, Amgen is the world's largest independent biotech firm. The company employs approximately 17,000 staff members. Its products include Epogen, Aranesp, Enbrel, Kineret,...

, Genentech

Genentech

Genentech Inc., or Genetic Engineering Technology, Inc., is a biotechnology corporation, founded in 1976 by venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson and biochemist Dr. Herbert Boyer. Trailing the founding of Cetus by five years, it was an important step in the evolution of the biotechnology industry...

, Millennium Pharmaceuticals

Millennium Pharmaceuticals

Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., The Takeda Oncology Company is a biopharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Company markets Velcade for injection, a cancer product, and has a growing clinical development pipeline of product candidates...

, Sandisk

SanDisk

SanDisk Corporation is an American multinational corporation that designs, develops and manufactures data storage solutions in a range of form factors using the flash memory, controller and firmware technologies. It was founded in 1988 by Dr. Eli Harari and Sanjay Mehrotra, non-volatile memory...

, Legato Software, Citrix, PlayFirst

PlayFirst

PlayFirst is a San Francisco-based publisher of casual games. The company’s mission is to deliver delightful games for everybody, every day. PlayFirst was founded in 2004 by industry veterans...

, Advent Software

Advent Software

Advent Software is a software company that makes software designed to automate portfolio accounting for investment management firms, ranging from family offices and investment advisors to large institutional investors and hedge funds. The company has customers in 60 countries that manage some $14...

, Vantive, Pure Software

Pure Software

Pure Software was founded in October 1991 by Reed Hastings and Mark Box. The original product was a debugging tool for Unix/C engineers called Purify. After adding new products such as Quantify and PureLink, and doubling its revenue every year for four years, Pure Software went public with the...

, Nuance

Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications is a multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA, that provides speech and imaging applications...

, Tibco, webMethods

WebMethods

webMethods is an enterprise software company, acquired by Software AG, focused on application integration, business process integration and B2B partner integration. Founded in 1996, the company pioneered the use of web services to connect software applications together within a single organization...

, Peribit, Redback Networks

Redback Networks

Redback Networks was a telecommunications equipment company, specializing in hardware and software used by ISPs to manage broadband services. In December 2006, Ericsson and Redback announced they had signed a definitive agreement under which Ericsson would acquire Redback...

, Concur, 3Par

3PAR

3PAR Inc. is a manufacturer of systems and software for data storage and information management headquartered in Fremont, California, USA. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard. 3PAR produces a range of enterprise storage products, including hardware disk arrays and storage management...

, Snapfish

Snapfish

Snapfish is a web-based photo sharing and photo printing service that is owned by Hewlett-Packard. Members can upload files for free, and are given unlimited photo storage.- History :...

 and Akimbi Systems

Virtual lab automation

Virtual Lab Automation refers to a category of software solutions to automate IT labs using virtualization technology. Virtual Lab Automation solutions are available as on-premise packaged software or as a cloud service.-History:...

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Mayfield is a supporter of the Mayfield Fellows Program

Mayfield Fellows Program

The Mayfield Fellows Program is a university program that offers students in-depth training and experience in high-tech entrepreneurship.The program, originally called the "Technology Ventures Co-op," was founded in 1996 at Stanford University and expanded in 2001 to include the University of...

 at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 and Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

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External links

• Mayfield Fund (company website)