What investors have publicly disclosed stakes in DuckDuckGo and when did they invest?
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Executive summary
DuckDuckGo has publicly acknowledged a set of outside investors primarily tied to a large secondary funding event in mid‑2021 and to a series of earlier venture and secondary transactions reported by market data vendors; the clearest, named public disclosures center on the June 2021 roughly $100M secondary round that included OMERS Ventures, Thrive, GP Bullhound, Impact America Fund and named individuals such as Brian Acton and Tim Berners‑Lee [1]. Data vendors and private‑market platforms add additional names across multiple years — including Union Square Ventures, Tiger Global, and a range of institutional and growth funds — but complete timing and amounts for every investor are opaque because DuckDuckGo is private and secondary trades dominate recent disclosures [2] [3] [4].
1. The headline: June 16, 2021 secondary round — who was named
The most explicit public accounting of outside investors comes from DuckDuckGo’s disclosure around a “mainly secondary investment” announced in mid‑June 2021, which TechCrunch summarizes from DuckDuckGo’s own blog and which name‑checks OMERS Ventures, Thrive, GP Bullhound, Impact America Fund and individual investors including WhatsApp co‑founder Brian Acton, web inventor Tim Berners‑Lee, Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor as participants in that roughly $100M transaction [1].
2. What “secondary” means here, and why it matters for who’s disclosed
DuckDuckGo described the deal as primarily secondary, meaning cash bought existing shares from employees or early backers rather than new primary capital into the company; that structure both allowed DuckDuckGo to name participating buyers and limited the scope of public disclosure about who retained long‑term stakes versus who merely sold into liquidity [1]. Market trackers corroborate the June 2021 secondary as the company’s most prominent recent funding event [5].
3. Earlier and other reported investors: VCs and data vendors’ lists
Beyond the 2021 secondary, multiple private‑market databases list a constellation of institutional investors that have been reported to hold stakes at various times: PitchBook names Avenir Growth Capital, Bracket Capital, Fifth Down Capital, K5 Global and Late Stage Management among a longer list of roughly 31 named investors in its profile [6]. Forge and other platforms flag OMERS Ventures and Union Square Ventures as key backers in DuckDuckGo’s funding history [2].
4. Conflicting and patchwork records across databases
Different data vendors report different totals and dates — CB Insights counts about 20 investors and records the $100M secondary on June 16, 2021 as the latest large round [5], while Tracxn compiles DuckDuckGo’s funding as including a $100M Series B on the same date and lists GP Bullhound and Impact America Fund as lead investors for that event [7]. Crunchbase headlines Tiger Global Management as a recent investor in its company financials page, though the platform does not publish DuckDuckGo’s full cap table in the sources provided here [3].
5. Why there is no single authoritative public roster
DuckDuckGo remains a private company and has relied on secondary market trades and selective blog disclosures to report investor participation; private‑market platforms and exchanges that facilitate secondary trading (e.g., Nasdaq Private Market) record and republish transaction activity but cannot legally or practically provide a complete public cap table for all holders, which means comprehensive verification of every investor and exact investment dates is limited outside of the company’s own selective announcements [4] [8].
6. How to read the public record: what’s certain and what isn’t
What can be stated with confidence from public reporting is that DuckDuckGo’s June 2021 roughly $100M secondary attracted a mixture of institutional VCs and notable individual investors — OMERS Ventures, Thrive, GP Bullhound, Impact America Fund, Brian Acton, Tim Berners‑Lee and others — and that multiple data vendors list additional venture and growth investors such as Union Square Ventures, Tiger Global, Avenir Growth Capital and others across DuckDuckGo’s private capital history [1] [2] [3] [6]. What cannot be assembled from the sources provided here is a definitive, date‑stamped cap table listing every investor and the precise timing of each stake beyond the major reported secondary event, because private company disclosures and secondary‑market reporting are fragmented [4] [8].