Lightspeed Venture Partners discloses its $1.2 billion Netskope stake with the stock above its average target
Netskope closed Friday above the average analyst target on the day Morgan Stanley moved to the sidelines, and a filing with the SEC put Lightspeed Venture Partners' whole position on the record: 56.5 million shares, all in passive form. Anyone buying the stock into its December 2 results now knows exactly how much could come to market.
Richard Tangthree-minute read
Friday's Netskope−3.14% — Netskope, down 3.14 percent today story was Morgan Stanley's+0.55% — Morgan Stanley, up 0.55 percent today downgrade. 1 The document that reached the SEC on Friday, November 13 matters more to anyone holding the stock: a Schedule 13G/A shows Lightspeed Venture Partners, the venture firm that led the cloud-security company's 2017 funding round, still holding 56.5 million shares, every one of them in passive form. 24 At Friday's close the block is worth about $1.2 billion. 23 The largest other reported institutional stake, the asset manager First Trust Advisors' 10.7 million shares, is under a fifth of it. 1
One block, twenty entities, no one in sole control
The 13G/A is the form large holders file when they claim no interest in control, and it measures Lightspeed's position as of September 30: 13.8% of all Netskope common stock, spread across seven vehicles filed by twenty related entities. 2 All voting and disposal power is shared, none is sole, and the entities expressly disclaim acting as a group. 2 Even a filing that claims no control tells the market exactly how many shares could come to it.
Lightspeed's Netskope block sits in six funds, the largest 15.6 million shares
56.5 million Class B shares, no sole control, all convertible into the traded class
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Lightspeed SPV II | 15.6M |
| Lightspeed IX | 14.2M |
| Lightspeed Select | 8.8M |
| Lightspeed SPV II-B | 7.8M |
| Lightspeed Select II | 7.5M |
| Lightspeed Opportunity | 2.7M |
The pipeline into sellable stock is already built
The stake is Class B, which converts into the Class A shares that trade on Nasdaq. 23 The filing's arithmetic was adjusted for a Lightspeed conversion on September 10, and the next day one of its funds sold 10,621 shares at $14.90, about $158,000, in a transaction disclosed to the SEC. 12 That sale is the first working proof of the pipeline: convert, then sell, one day apart, at a price the stock has since left behind.
The price has outrun the analysts who raised it
Netskope closed Friday at $21.75, above the $20.82 average target of the 19 analysts covering it, and Morgan Stanley cut the stock to equal-weight anyway. 31 The bank raised its target from $16 to $24 as it cut the rating, and said the valuation already reflects an improvement in sales while competition heats up in Secure Access Service Edge, the converged security-and-networking market Netskope sells into. 5
The close beats the Street's average target and sits below Morgan Stanley's new $24
Data
| Price per share | |
|---|---|
| Friday close | $21.75 |
| Average target | $20.82 |
| Morgan Stanley prior | $16 |
| Morgan Stanley new | $24 |
The business under that price is still delivering: the July quarter beat guidance on every metric, with revenue up 29% from a year earlier. 6 In September the same bank called Netskope "positioned to capture AI opportunity" after that quarter's upside, and First Trust raised its stake by 153% in the third quarter. 31
Revenue has risen every quarter, 29% in the July quarter
Data
| Revenue | |
|---|---|
| Q3 '24 | $138.53M |
| Q4 '24 | $148.49M |
| Q1 '25 | $157.74M |
| Q2 '25 | $170.76M |
| Q3 '25 | $184.17M |
| Q4 '25 | $196.33M |
| Q1 '26 | $201.59M |
| Q2 '26 | $220.54M |
We flagged on October 30 that the premium rests on AI agent-security controls with no published adoption numbers; the company news since has been an earnings date and a sales hire. 37
Nothing in the filing requires Lightspeed to hold
The filing announces no sale. It maps capacity: every Lightspeed share sits one conversion away from a market paying above the Street's own average. 23 The form rules out influence over the company; it says nothing about selling. The next signal is a Form 4, the trade notice that surfaced the September sale, and the first test of both the downgrade and this block is fiscal third-quarter results on December 2. 13
Anyone buying above that consensus into December 2 is in the risk camp; this filing is their supply map.
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