Fremont: Around 38 U.S. venture capital funds raised $5.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011 that marks a 162 percent increase by dollar commitments but a 41 percent decline by number of funds compared to the third quarter in 2011, reports Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. As a whole, the year 2011 witnessed several vicissitudes in the VC industry. Still few of them raised funds to fund their dream companies. Below mentioned are few such VC firms that raised a whooping amount in 2011.

Khosla Ventures

In 2011, Khosla Ventures raised $1.05 billion in series D funding. Founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the VC firm had plans to invest a large portion of the fund in clean technology companies. Earlier the firm has raised $1 billion in order to invest in early to mid stage and to later stage firms. Khosla Ventures manages a main fund supporting early and late-stage investors and seed funding for developing very early-stage experiments. Their main focus is on next-generations energy projects, new materials, mobility, Internet and silicon technologies. Their clean tech portfolio covers sectors like agriculture, utility scale generation, distributed generation, electrical efficiency, mechanical efficiency, batteries, cellulosic alcohol, building materials, plastics and chemicals and several others. Whereas the information technology portfolio covers semiconductors, cloud, devices, services, advertising, social media, systems and services.

Khosla Ventures had made investments in several companies, including $30 million into RockMelt,$5.6 million to MyLikes. During the recession, two partners left the firm as investments started to peter out in the once so-hot sector, cleantech space.