Charles River Ventures

CRV (a.k.a. Charles River Ventures) is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology and new media companies. The firm, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Menlo Park, California, was founded in 1970 to commercialise research that came out of MIT. (Its name comes from the Charles River that divides Boston and Cambridge)

The firm has raised over $2.1 billion since inception across 16 funds. Upon closing of the 16th fund, the firm rebranded to CRV. Prior to that, the firm's most recent fund, CRV XV, closed in February 2012 with $375 million of investor commitments. CRV's 14th fund raised $320 million of commitments.

In 2013, it purchased a large portion of the Pebble Smartwatch for 15 million dollars and is credited as the primary reason why Pebble was sold to Fitbit in December 2016, netting Charles River Ventures close to close to 40 million dollars.

Among CRV's portfolio companies are Aveksa,Blippy, Cascade Communications, ChipCom, Ciena Corporation, Continental Cablevision, Crushpath, Earbits, Fiksu, iBasis, Netezza, OneLogin,Parametric Technology Corporation, SimpliVity, Sonus Networks, SpeechWorks, Stella,Stratus Technologies, Sybase,Twitter, Udacity, Vignette Corporation, Yammer, and Zendesk.