Insight Partners’ diversified strategy is a deliberate choice, not a failure of nerve, according to Deven Parekh, who has co-run the firm for 26 years. Speaking at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in New York, Parekh laid out why he is watching peers write 35–40% of entire funds into OpenAI or Anthropic and choosing not to follow them.
The Concentration Bet Parekh Won’t Take
Insight Partners holds stakes in both OpenAI and Anthropic, but Parekh was candid about the logic that keeps those positions from dominating the portfolio. ‘I know two funds right now raising their entire fund in a month,’ he said, ‘whose pitch is literally “35–40% of this fund is going into one of those two companies.”‘ His assessment was dry: ‘This business has always rewarded diversification over a long horizon.’
The firm is on fund 13. Parekh’s framing is explicitly generational: a single-fund lens might make a 25% Anthropic allocation look clever right now, but decade-over-decade data, he argued, does not support excessive concentration. He acknowledged the exceptions, Founders Fund and Thrive among them, and conceded they have executed concentrated strategies well. Still, he is not moving.
The current valuation environment is part of the calculation. Follow-on rounds are moving so fast there is almost no incremental data between raises, meaning investors are paying more without reducing risk. Parekh’s response is to go earlier, writing $20–25 million cheques rather than $500 million ones, and doubling down on the winners. Wiz is his clean example: a Series A entry, repeated follow-ons, a gain that dwarfed what a one-and-done entry would have produced.
The Legora Loss and the Deals That Got Away
Not every early bet lands. Insight competed for Legora, the AI legal-tech company, with Jeff Horing flying to Stockholm to pitch the founder. General Catalyst won that round. Parekh’s post-mortem was brief: ‘I think they sold their value proposition better than we sold ours that time.’
The miss has aged expensively. Legora’s Series B, announced May 2025, raised $80 million at a $675 million valuation, co-led by ICONIQ and General Catalyst. A $150 million Series C followed in October 2025 at $1.8 billion, led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Then, in March 2026, a $550 million Series D at a $5.55 billion valuation. All within roughly two years of the company’s founding. Parekh’s philosophy is that it is a big world and you do not need to win every deal. That is easier to say before the deal compounds to $5.5 billion.
Armis: The Small Cheque That Became a $7.75 Billion Exit
The better story for Insight is Armis, a cybersecurity company Insight initially lost to Sequoia. A partner kept the relationship alive with a $5 million cheque out of an $11 billion fund. Eighteen months later, Insight bought out the entire cap table, Sequoia included, for a nine-figure sum.
By the time of the acquisition announcement in December 2025, Armis had surpassed $340 million in annual recurring revenue, with year-over-year growth exceeding 50%. The company had raised $435 million at a $6.1 billion valuation in a pre-IPO round just weeks before the deal emerged. ServiceNow’s completed acquisition came in at approximately $7.75 billion in cash, funded through a combination of cash on hand and debt. Parekh had quoted $7 billion in the interview; the final closed figure was higher.
Insight Partners’ Diversified Strategy and the DPI Reckoning
The Armis exit feeds into a broader point Parekh made about liquidity discipline. Insight has returned more than $20 billion to LPs over the last two years through strategic sales and IPOs, with more in the pipeline. He is not gentle about funds that haven’t done the same: many first- and second-time fund managers who raised aggressively in 2021 to 2023 will not raise a next fund because they did not prioritise getting cash back to investors.
Parekh manages $90 billion in assets across early-stage, growth, and buyout. He acknowledged that buyouts are difficult at current rates, with debt markets unreceptive to software and exit multiples compressed. The firm’s last major buyout was in 2024.
Insight’s record is not without its complications. In June 2023, the SEC issued an order reflecting a $2.35 million settlement with Insight Venture Management LLC over overcharging of management fees. At that point, the firm held approximately $79 billion in regulatory assets under management.
On the IPO front, Parekh sees SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI each potentially crossing a trillion-dollar market cap in a six-to-eight-month window. His real question is what happens to the next tier: if public investors have watched something go from zero to $65 billion in four years, a 10x from a more mature company starts to look pedestrian. That recalibration, not the megacap listings themselves, will set the terms for venture over the next 18 months.
