Benchmark is an American early-stage venture capital firm founded in 1995 by Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, and Val Vaden, and headquartered at 140 New Montgomery Street in San Francisco, California (with a second office in Woodside). Benchmark is known for its distinctive equal partnership structure, where a small number of general partners share ownership and carry equally with no junior/senior hierarchy and no managing partner. The firm concentrates on leading first institutional rounds — typically Series A — and historically kept fund sizes small (around $425M) with a focus on consumer, marketplaces, social, open source, developer tools, infrastructure, enterprise software, fintech, crypto, and artificial intelligence. Benchmark has backed transformational companies including eBay, Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Snap, Dropbox, Discord, Docker, Zendesk, Confluent, Elastic, New Relic, Asana, Amplitude, Nextdoor, Stitch Fix, Yelp, OpenTable, Zillow, Red Hat, Airtable, Benchling, Cockroach Labs, Chainalysis, HackerOne, Contentful, Modern Treasury, Stytch, and, more recently, AI-native companies such as LangChain, Cerebras, MindsDB, Lovable, Legora, Gumloop, and Starcloud. In 2026 Benchmark broke with tradition to raise roughly $2B across two new vehicles, including its first-ever dedicated later-stage growth fund. This profile tracks Benchmark's identity and its portfolio graph across the API Evangelist network.
Firms are ranked by cumulative portfolio strength — how many highly-rated API companies they've backed, weighted by tier across composite quality and agent-readiness. The averages below are a secondary read on the typical company in the book.
Benchmark has 41 portfolio companies tracked on the APIs.io network, of which 35 (85%) publish APIs indexed here. The remaining 5 are tracked as profiles without a published API on the network.
Its highest-rated API providers on the network are Confluent, New Relic, Benchling, Zendesk, Asana.
Portfolio on the Network
Portfolio companies that publish APIs indexed on APIs.io, grouped by their
API Evangelist rating. Exemplar and Strong are expanded by default.
Exemplar5Complete, well-documented, and agent-ready
The 37 portfolio companies with APIs in the catalog, backed by
Benchmark, scored on the Kin Score. Every figure below is computed from
the catalog — nothing here is written.
A facet is averaged over the members that carry it, not over the whole cohort — the
“Scored” column is that count. Averaging an absent facet as zero would score our own
coverage gaps as the providers’ posture.
What this cohort publishes
Artifact
This cohort
Catalog
Difference
MCP server (any)
29%
11%
+18
MCP server (first-party)
42%
13%
+29
Agent Skills
0%
0%
0
OAuth scopes
34%
12%
+22
Security
100%
96%
+4
Arazzo workflows
21%
2%
+19
Governance rules
45%
13%
+32
mcp_pct counts any mcp/ artifact including ones API Evangelist derived from the provider OpenAPI; mcp_first_party_pct counts only servers the provider publishes. Prefer the latter.
This roster declares 40 members; 38
resolve to a provider in the catalog and 37 carry a score
(97%). The figures above describe the scored members only.Generated from the catalog build of
22 September 2026, across 27674
providers, using the same computation served by the
APIs.io cohort API. Briefs are published for rosters of
5 or more scored providers; below that a distribution is not meaningful.
aid: benchmark
name: Benchmark
description: >-
Benchmark is an American early-stage venture capital firm founded in 1995 by
Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, and Val Vaden, and
headquartered at 140 New Montgomery Street in San Francisco, California (with a
second office in Woodside). Benchmark is known for its distinctive equal
partnership structure, where a small number of general partners share ownership
and carry equally with no junior/senior hierarchy and no managing partner.
The firm concentrates on leading first institutional rounds — typically Series A
— and historically kept fund sizes small (around $425M) with a focus on
consumer, marketplaces, social, open source, developer tools, infrastructure,
enterprise software, fintech, crypto, and artificial intelligence. Benchmark
has backed transformational companies including eBay, Uber, Twitter, Instagram,
Snap, Dropbox, Discord, Docker, Zendesk, Confluent, Elastic, New Relic, Asana,
Amplitude, Nextdoor, Stitch Fix, Yelp, OpenTable, Zillow, Red Hat, Airtable,
Benchling, Cockroach Labs, Chainalysis, HackerOne, Contentful, Modern Treasury,
Stytch, and, more recently, AI-native companies such as LangChain, Cerebras,
MindsDB, Lovable, Legora, Gumloop, and Starcloud. In 2026 Benchmark broke with
tradition to raise roughly $2B across two new vehicles, including its first-ever
dedicated later-stage growth fund. This profile tracks Benchmark's identity and
its portfolio graph across the API Evangelist network.
x-type: venture-capital
x-category: Venture Capital
deliveryModel:
model: unknown
open_source: false
commercial: false
callable_host: false
label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
confidence: low
source:
- none
generated: '2026-08-28'
method: derived
accessModel:
pricing: unknown
onboarding: unknown
trial: false
try_now: false
public: false
label: Unknown
confidence: low
source: []
generated: '2026-07-22'
method: derived
image: https://logo.clearbit.com/benchmark.com
tags:
- Venture Capital
- Seed
- Series A
- Early Stage
- Developer Tools
- Infrastructure
- Enterprise Software
- Marketplace
- Artificial Intelligence
- Fintech
- United States
tags_raw:
- Venture Capital
- Seed
- Series A
- Early Stage
- Developer Tools
- Infrastructure
- Enterprise Software
- Marketplaces
- Artificial Intelligence
- Fintech
- United States
url: >-
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/benchmark/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-17'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis: []
common:
- type: Website
url: https://www.benchmark.com/
- type: Portfolio
url: portfolio/benchmark-portfolio.yml
- type: Team
url: team/benchmark-team.yml
- type: Twitter
url: https://twitter.com/benchmark
- type: LinkedIn
url: https://www.linkedin.com/company/benchmark-vc
- type: Crunchbase
url: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/benchmark
- type: Features
data:
- "Stage: Seed, Series A (early stage); later-stage growth fund added 2026"
- "Typical check: leads first institutional rounds (historically single/low double-digit millions)"
- "Sectors: consumer, marketplaces, social, open source, developer tools, infrastructure, enterprise software, fintech, crypto, AI"
- "Geography: United States (San Francisco Bay Area centered)"
- "Founded: 1995"
- "Founders: Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, Val Vaden"
- "HQ: 140 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA (also Woodside, CA)"
- "Structure: equal partnership — partners share ownership and carry equally"
- "2026: ~$2B raised across two funds, including first dedicated growth fund (~$1.25B)"
sources:
- https://www.benchmark.com/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchmark_(venture_capital_firm)
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/03/benchmark-raises-its-first-ever-growth-fund-as-part-of-2b-capital-raise/
updated: '2026-07-17'
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
url: http://apisjson.org
- FN: Benchmark
url: https://www.benchmark.com/
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