Kevin Harvey (venture capitalist)

Kevin Harvey is a founding member of and general partner at Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He was ranked No. 27 on the 2011 Forbes Midas List and was No. 59 in 2012.

Education and early career

Harvey graduated in 1987 with a B.S.E.E. degree in engineering from Rice University. While in college, he founded software company StyleWare, which Apple later purchased and continued to develop as ClarisWorks.

Harvey founded and was president of Approach Software, where he led the development of the world’s first end-user client/server database for Microsoft Windows. Lotus Development acquired Approach Software in 1993.

Benchmark

At Benchmark, Harvey has invested in a number of companies that have gone to complete successful IPOs, including Red Hat and Proofpoint. He also led the firm’s investments in such companies as BOKU, Broadbase Software, Bytemobile (now part of Citrix Systems), CollabNet, CloudPassage, Eucalyptus Systems, Highlight, Ingenio (acquired by AT&T), Kana (KANA), Metaweb (acquired by Google), MySQL (acquired by Sun Microsystems), oDesk, oFoto (acquired by Kodak), RemarQ Communities (acquired by Critical Path, Inc.), Rightscale, Tellme Networks (acquired by Microsoft), Terracotta, When.com (acquired by America Online), Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo!), and Minerva University.

Harvey serves on the boards of Upwork, Ingenio, Metaweb Technologies, BOKU, and Pipewise.