Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Facebook are together at last.
VentureWire reports today that Kleiner is taking a small stake in Facebook by buying as much as $38 million of stock from other shareholders at a valuation of $52 billion–a bit higher than the $50 billion price tag that Goldman Sachs and DST Global set when they recently invested $1.5 billion.
Kleiner, which made billions of dollars during the dot-com boom from early bets on Google, Amazon.com and Netscape, missed out on Facebook in 2005, choosing instead to stick with another social-networking site it sunk money into in 2003, Friendster. Since then, Kleiner has had to play catch-up to restore its reputation as one of the premier Internet investors.