More depth and expertise for our Growth Practice
In times of economic uncertainty, we believe that companies with the right vision and sound leadership will position themselves to thrive for years to come. That’s one of the reasons why we raised more than $7B in new capital over the past year, with $4.5B dedicated to investing in growth-stage companies. We’re committed to partner with this next generation of transformational companies and to help entrepreneurs go the distance.
At Lightspeed, investing is just the beginning of the journey. It’s about partnership — establishing close working relationships with founders and CEOs, offering them guidance, expertise, and support. That requires having people on the ground, close to the action. We’ve spent much of the last year building up our Growth Team to meet our commitment to helping companies scale, and we’re excited to announce our latest hire, Sebastian Duesterhoeft.
Sebastian joins us after five years at Coatue Management, where he helped oversee growth-stage investments in enterprise companies like Airtable, Confluent, Gitlab, and Snowflake. Prior to that he spent nearly five years at Silver Lake overseeing later-stage investments, after having started his career as an investment banking analyst with Morgan Stanley. Over the years Sebastian and I discussed our expanding Growth strategy, and I was impressed with how engaging and assertive he was. He has depth in how he thinks about markets, companies, and teams and has seen what great looks like from the inside. The more time we spent together, I was convinced he would help us expand our strategy while sharing the same orientation to finding impact.
At Lightspeed, Sebastian will join a Growth Team that is focused on finding significant opportunities in the current dynamic economic climate. We believe pathways to scale are presenting themselves daily, and we’re working to be best positioned in the market to seize on them.
Some of our recent growth investments where we’ve led or significantly participated in include Alloy, Anduril, Arctic Wolf, Axonius, BetterUp, Carta, Cato, ClickUp, Dexterity, Faire, Glean, Grafana, Handshake, Matillion, Moveworks, Multiverse, Navan (formerly TripActions), 1Password, Payhawk, Personio, Razorpay, Seismic, Thoughtspot, Ultima, and Wiz.
We’re so excited to have Sebastian join us. If you’re on a journey that sounds something like that, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you and see how we can help.
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