- Pear VC closed a $333M Fund V, bringing assets under management to over $1.1B.
- Fund V is about 23% smaller than the $432M Pear raised in May 2023.
- The 10 largest US funds took 32.9% of all venture capital raised in 2025.
Pear VC has closed its fifth fund at $333 million, about $99 million less than the $432 million it raised in May 2023. The Silicon Valley seed investor, an early backer of DoorDash, says Fund V is the right size for what it does.
Pear says the close takes its assets under management above $1.1 billion. Most of the fund will go into new pre-seed and seed investments over roughly two and a half years, with capital held back for follow-on rounds in companies that break out. The firm invests across AI, business-to-business technology, biotech, consumer, deep tech, fintech, and healthcare.
“Our ambition is to be the best in the world at one thing: finding extraordinary founders first, before they become obvious to the rest of the market, and helping them build extraordinary companies from zero. Fund V gives us the right amount of capital to keep doing that with focus, discipline, and the same early-stage conviction that defines Pear,” said Pejman Nozad, founding managing partner of Pear VC.
A smaller fund in a market of bigger ones
Pear’s smaller fund arrives as money concentrates in the largest ones. The National Venture Capital Association, using PitchBook data, reported that US venture firms raised $67 billion across 585 funds in 2025. The 10 largest took $22 billion of that, or 32.9%, up from 13% in 2021. The other 575 funds shared about $44.9 billion, averaging roughly $78 million each.
At $333 million, Pear sits well above that average and far below the headline closes. Tech Funding News reported Bessemer Venture Partners’ $5.75 billion across two funds and Bain Capital Ventures’ $1.6 billion Fund XI in September. TFN also covered Endeavor Catalyst’s $320 million Fund V, which is close in size to Pear’s.
Pear’s argument is that capital is not where the contest is decided. “Capital is becoming commoditised. Access is not. AI now lets anyone build what once took dozens of engineers. We believe the firms closest to founders at the earliest stages, not just to the financing rounds that follow, will have the advantage. Our job is to build relationships with top founder talent months, if not years, before the rest of the market realises what they are capable of building,” said Mar Hershenson, who co-founded Pear with Nozad in 2013.
The portfolio behind the pitch
Since its first fund, Pear has backed DoorDash, Gusto, Vanta, Guardant Health, and Affinity. It points to six more recent companies as proof of the model.
Listen Labs, which uses AI agents to interview customers, signed a definitive agreement on September 29 to be acquired by Salesforce, after TFN reported the talks. Forus, an AI platform that handles insurance approvals, financial-assistance paperwork, and pharmacy steps after a doctor writes a prescription, raised a $150 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, tripling its valuation in four months.
Gravis Robotics, a Zurich startup that retrofits autonomy kits onto excavators other companies build, raised a $200 million Series A from SoftBank at a reported $1 billion post-money valuation. Pear took part in Gravis’s earlier $23 million round in November 2025.
Vals AI, which tests AI models on professional tasks, raised a $40 million Series A at a $400 million valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. Pear was in its $5 million seed round, and the company came through PearX in 2023.
Andera, which automates internal-audit testing under the US Sarbanes-Oxley financial-reporting law, raised $37 million in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Phinity Labs, which is building autonomous chip design, has reached an eight-figure annualised run rate, according to Pear.
Three former founders become general partners
Pear also promoted three investors to general partners. All three built companies before they started investing. Arash Afrakhteh joined in 2020 and invests in enterprise and business-to-business companies across AI and machine learning, cloud, and data infrastructure. He co-founded Cariden Technologies, which Cisco acquired in 2012.
Ajay Kamat joined in 2015 and invests in consumer, fintech, and healthcare. He co-founded Wedding Party, a Pear-backed company Instacart acquired, and served as its chief executive.Shravan Reddy joined in 2024 and invests in AI infrastructure, robotics, and vertical AI. He co-founded Pixelapse, which Dropbox acquired, and led engineering teams at Stripe.
“Arash, Ajay, and Shravan each embody what makes Pear special: deep care for founders, exceptional leadership, and a selfless commitment to our community. For us, this is one of the most meaningful milestones in Pear’s history. Thirteen years after starting the firm, we now have a new generation of General Partners who have grown with Pear and will help build what comes next,” said Nozad and Hershenson, founding managing partners at Pear.
Fund V tests the claim that access beats capital. If Pear is right, a smaller fund costs it little, because the founders it backs first go on to raise from larger firms that already know its name. If not, the question is how much of a breakout company Pear can hold on to once $150 million and $200 million rounds arrive.
