Murat Bicer

Background

Murat Bicer is a General Partner at CRV (formerly Charles River Ventures), where he has invested since August 2015 ^{1 2}. He is Turkish-born and holds a B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey, an M.S.E.E. from Northeastern University, and an M.B.A. summa cum laude from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College ^{3 4}.

Bicer began his career as a software engineer at Intra Information Technologies from 1999 to 2000 ¹. He then moved to Mercury Computer Systems, where he held business development, product management, and engineering roles from approximately 2002 to 2007, expanding Mercury’s wireless communications business and working with trading firms to improve the performance of algorithmic trading and derivatives pricing applications ³.

He transitioned into venture capital at Battery Ventures, starting as a Senior Associate in October 2007 and rising to Vice President by June 2010, where he remained until February 2012 ¹. At Battery, he invested actively in enterprise IT, software, and mobile, backing companies including Opscode, Zerto, XtremIO (acquired by EMC for approximately $430M), GreenBytes (acquired by Oracle), Viridity (acquired by Schneider), and MoreMagic (acquired by Oberthur) ^{3 5}.

In February 2012, Bicer joined RTP Ventures as a General Partner, focusing on investments in software, enterprise infrastructure, and internet companies, and leading RTP’s activities in Turkey and Israel ³. While at RTP, he co-led Datadog’s Series A in November 2012 alongside Index Ventures and joined the boards of both Datadog and Zerto ^{6 3}.

In August 2015, Bicer joined CRV as General Partner ¹. He has been named to the Forbes Midas List five times, ranking #24 in 2024 with Datadog as his notable deal ^{2 7}.

Stated Thesis

Bicer publicly describes his focus as backing founders at the earliest stages of company building, with particular interest in enterprise software and B2B SaaS ^{2 8}. He has stated that he looks for founding teams with exceptional talent and unwavering commitment, seeking teams that have “the sparkle in their eyes” ².

Bicer has championed Boston and New York as strong alternatives to the Bay Area for building category-defining B2B software companies ⁸. He has emphasized the importance of balanced founding teams, warning that FAANG engineers starting companies should not build all-engineering teams, as they may not appreciate the go-to-market expertise their former employers perfected ⁹.

Bicer has stated a conviction that the best investment opportunities emerge during downturns. In October 2022, he told Fortune that “some of our best investments are actually made right after these downturns” ¹⁰.

He has described his investment approach as driven by visceral excitement upon encountering exceptional products, noting that when he first saw Datadog’s product before investing in their seed round, he found it to be fresh and design-oriented — unlike any monitoring platform at the time ².

Inferred Thesis

Based on 17 verified investments attributed specifically to Bicer (from the portfolio table below), his actual investment behavior shows the following patterns:

Stage distribution: Of 17 verified investments, 4 are seed-stage (24%), 9 are Series A (53%), and 4 are Series B (24%). Despite stating a focus on earliest-stage investing, the majority of his verified deals are Series A, where he can evaluate an initial product before committing. This is consistent with CRV’s firm-level “post-product/pre-traction” philosophy.

Sector breakdown: Enterprise/B2B software dominates: 5 of 17 investments are in developer tools or infrastructure (29%), 4 in e-commerce infrastructure and marketing automation (24%), 3 in cybersecurity (18%), 2 in AI/ML (12%), 2 in cloud/data infrastructure (12%), and 1 in testing/QA (6%). Bicer’s portfolio is heavily weighted toward companies building tools for engineering and operations teams.

Geographic concentration: The majority of verified investments are US-based companies, with concentration in San Francisco and Boston. Arena (Brazil-headquartered) is a notable exception. Bicer’s time at RTP Ventures gave him exposure to Israel and Turkey, and his Battery-era investment in Zerto (Israel-based) reflects this.

Check size: Signal by NFX reports his investment range as $500K to $20M, with a sweet spot around $13M ¹. This is consistent with CRV’s typical early-stage check sizes of $5M to $15M.

Founder profile patterns: Bicer shows a strong preference for technical founders building developer-facing products. Multiple portfolio companies (Datadog, Doppler, LanceDB, Impart Security, mabl) are built by engineers solving problems they personally experienced. He has explicitly stated that founding teams should not be all-engineering, suggesting he values founders who pair technical depth with go-to-market awareness ⁹.

Co-investor patterns: Bicer frequently co-invests with Y Combinator alumni companies (Doppler, LanceDB), Sequoia Capital (Doppler), and GV/Google Ventures (Doppler). His earlier deals at Battery and RTP involved co-investments with Index Ventures (Datadog Series A).

Notable pattern: Bicer has a track record of following founding teams across companies. He wanted to invest in mabl co-founders Izzy Azeri and Dan Belcher since 2008, couldn’t invest in their first company Stackdriver (because he already backed competitor Datadog), and invested as soon as they started mabl ¹¹. Similarly, former Signal Sciences colleagues founded Impart Security, and Bicer backed them again ¹².

Exits: Bicer has been involved in several notable exits: Datadog IPO (2019, $30B+ market cap), Signal Sciences (acquired by Fastly for $775M in 2020), Zerto (acquired by HPE for $374M in 2021), Voyage AI (acquired by MongoDB for $220M in 2025), and multiple Battery-era exits including XtremIO (acquired by EMC for ~$430M) ^{2 13 14 15 5}.

Portfolio

This table includes 17 investments where Murat Bicer’s personal involvement has been verified through board seats, press mentions, or CRV announcements. Additional CRV firm-level investments he may have participated in are not included without specific attribution.

In Their Own Words

“We see Datadog setting the standard for infrastructure monitoring in the cloud age.” — Murat Bicer, as Managing Director of RTP Ventures, Datadog Series A press release, November 2012 ⁶

“Some of our best investments are actually made right after these downturns.” — Murat Bicer, General Partner at CRV, Fortune interview, October 2022 ¹⁰

“Working for a FAANG company used to be a novelty, and some considered it a reliable litmus test for technical competence or business success. Now, hundreds of thousands have walked through those halls. Investors are less starstruck today by FAANG founders and more cognizant of their advantages and challenges, so you should be too, before you leave to start your own company.” — Murat Bicer, Crunchbase News, 2022 ⁹

“Make sure your founding team isn’t all on the engineering side. FAANG engineers may not be aware of the systematic go-to-market that their previous employers have spent many years perfecting, with lots of applied experience and expertise. Give marketing and sales the respect they deserve as very nuanced and challenging domains that will have a lot of bearing on your startup’s ultimate success.” — Murat Bicer, Crunchbase News, 2022 ⁹

“Even the most brilliant engineer is hamstrung when that incredible build infrastructure, automation environment, test environment, monitoring, communications, etc., get taken away.” — Murat Bicer, Crunchbase News, 2022 ⁹

“The ability to securely store, transmit, and audit secrets has never been more critical as one minor error can lead to catastrophic results. In a world where putting a single space in the wrong place can literally take down a company’s entire website, Doppler makes it easy to prevent leaks and outages with their developer-focused approach.” — Murat Bicer, Doppler Series A announcement, April 2022 ²⁶

“It’s not uncommon to send dozens of texts to friends, family and loved ones throughout the day. In a competitive world chock full of choices, brands that want to authentically connect with customers have to evolve and go where discussions are happening and that’s not always in inboxes. Emotive is perfectly poised to become the best way for companies to quickly engage people, because Emotive fosters meaningful conversations where customers are having them.” — Murat Bicer, Emotive Series B press release, February 2021 ²¹

“Talent is the heart and the engine of every successful business. Impart Security’s leadership team is chock-full of high-caliber product, engineering and security DNA and we all worked closely together at Signal Sciences.” — Murat Bicer, VentureBeat, on Impart Security seed round ¹²

What Founders Say

“Brittany and Murat make CRV shine and I’m so glad we partnered along Doppler’s journey.” — Brian Vallelunga, Founder and CEO of Doppler, CRV Medium post announcing Brittany Walker’s promotion to General Partner ³¹

“CRV has been supportive from the beginning and a wonderful partner in terms of helping us take Iterable to the next level. The entire team is friendly, approachable and accessible.” — Andrew Boni, CEO and Co-Founder of Iterable, CRV portfolio page ¹⁷

Note: The Iterable testimonial is sourced from CRV’s own portfolio page and references the CRV team broadly, not Bicer specifically. The Doppler testimonial references Bicer by name. No additional independently sourced founder testimonials specifically about Bicer were found through dedicated external searching.

Sources