InterWest Partners

InterWest Partners

InterWest Partners launched in 1979, making it one of the oldest active venture firms on Sand Hill Road. Wally Hawley co-founded the firm with a goal of long-term institution-building across cycles, anchoring the partnership in the early venture migration from Boston and New York to Northern California. Unlike the tech-native firms that emerged in the 1990s, InterWest built its brand by methodically expanding from IT into life sciences, creating parallel fund capabilities that predated the multi-sector franchise model now common on the West Coast. The firm invests across three primary domains: enterprise software, healthcare and life sciences, and industrial technology. InterWest is stage-agnostic within its mandates, writing initial checks from seed-stage rounds into growth equity. The firm traditionally organizes its partnership into dedicated, sector-focused investment teams that operate with significant autonomy. Historically, InterWest has raised fund vehicles sized from $400 million to over $650 million, covering everything from biotech seed deals to later-stage AI platform investments. Its geographic focus remains concentrated in the United States, with portfolio operations supporting portfolio companies from the San Francisco Peninsula outward into major technology and biotech hubs nationally. The partnership has deployed over $3.5 billion into more than 300 companies since inception (per the firm's official communications). InterWest operates from Menlo Park and San Francisco. Its longevity has produced a series of funds — InterWest X, for instance, closed at $650 million — that span multiple venture cycles from the dot-com era through the cloud and AI transitions. Known exits and mature holdings include a range of enterprise and health-tech leaders that have moved into public markets or been acquired by strategic consolidators in the diagnostics and health data sectors. What differentiates InterWest is its 45-year track record as a partnerships-based shop that has never drifted from a multi-sector venture model while outliving hundreds of generalist VC cohorts. Its organizational design — parallel healthcare and IT teams operating under one roof — established a structural template now emulated by many top-tier firms. This dual-domain DNA allowed it to fund biotech and SaaS companies long before crossover funds blurred the boundaries, providing deep technical underwriting that pure-tech GPs often lack.