NEA: the $28B+ VC giant behind Uber, Plaid and Cloudflare — with a long India history

New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is one of the biggest names in venture capital, full stop. Founded in 1977, the firm describes itself as "a global venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies" — and the numbers back it up: more than $28 billion in assets under management (as of June 30, 2025), over 280 portfolio company IPOs and 510+ acquisitions.

Investment thesis

NEA invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages — from seed through IPO. Its focus areas span enterprise and consumer technology, digital health and life sciences, with stated domain expertise across software, infrastructure, fintech, next-generation web technologies and artificial intelligence. In January 2023 it closed around $6.2B across two funds (early-stage and venture growth-stage) — the largest pool of capital in the firm's history.

Funds, stages and cheque sizes

NEA's AUM stood at over $25B at end-2022 and has since grown past $28B (June 2025). The firm does not publicly state current cheque sizes — seed-through-IPO means it can write everything from early cheques to growth-stage mega-rounds, but founders should treat any published figure as dated.

Notable portfolio

The global roll call is formidable: Uber, Plaid, Cloudflare, Groupon, Box, Diapers.com, Jet.com, Coursera and Duolingo. In India, NEA has a longer history than most US VCs: it entered around 2006 via NEA IndoUS Ventures (with Vani Kola and Vinod Dham) and opened a full-fledged Mumbai office in 2008. India bets included a $10M infusion in FirstCry (2015), a $25M round led in Naaptol (2011), a $13.2M Series A led in fitness startup GOQii, $12.5M Series A in MindTickle, $4M Series A in IntelligenceNODE, and $50M in Vishwa Infrastructure — its biggest India investment as of 2012. By 2012 the firm counted around 14 India portfolio companies and about $400M invested. One for the archives: the IndoUS joint venture later rebranded as Kalaari Capital after NEA exited in 2012.

People

Scott Sandell is Managing General Partner, with Tony Florence (MGP, Technology) and Mohamad Makhzoumi (MGP, Healthcare) leading the two core practices. The tech bench includes Partner Aaron Jacobson, Arjun Jain (promoted to Partner in February 2026), and principals Mason Murray, Hunter Worland and Lulu Xu. On India history: Bala Deshpande set up and headed NEA's India practice for a decade as Senior MD (she now runs MegaDelta Capital), with Ben Mathias and Peter Barris also in the India story. No current India-dedicated partner could be verified from public sources.

Credits and perks

NEA runs no startup accelerator and advertises no credits or perks programme — its pitch is scale, network and a half-century track record, not perks menus.

How to engage

There is no public pitch portal on nea.com. Engagement runs through direct outreach to the relevant partner or warm introduction — for Indian founders, that means leading with a story strong enough to cross time zones, and ideally a US-side connection into the tech or healthcare practice.