Full transparency: I like the team at Bloomberg Beta.
I worked at Bloomberg as a technology reporter for nearly six years before I started this newsletter. During my time at Bloomberg in San Francisco I got to know the team, including its leader Roy Bahat.
So when Bahat came to me with the news that the firm is announcing its fifth fund — another $75 million fund from Bloomberg LP to back the earliest of early startups — I said he should talk about the decision exclusively on our Substack Live.
You can watch that conversation in the video included in this post. We talked about Y Combinator’s impact on startup prices, the mood among seed investors, and Bloomberg Beta’s investing philosophy.
Bloomberg Beta’s investments include Replit, Flexport, Air Space Intelligence, Lambda Labs, LaunchDarkly, MasterClass, Netlify, Shield AI, Streamlit, and Weights & Biases.
The strategy has remained remarkably consistent: invest in startups with world-changing ideas as early as possible — not to get Bloomberg customers or strategic partners — but to make sure Bloomberg stays on the cutting edge of what the startup world is building.
The team has three general partners: Bahat, James Cham, and Karin Klein.
In 2022, Bloomberg Beta raised its fourth venture fund and its first opportunity fund — $75 million each. Bahat says the firm still has about halfway to go to deploy the opportunity fund. The firm raises all its money from one limited partner, Bloomberg LP.
They aren’t painting a story of reinventing venture capital. Bahat compares it to a chef who “says they really care about cooking food.” The firm is focused on finding interesting founders early. “How many founders have become millionaires after we invested? That’s the point of pride more than rate of return.” (Bahat pegs the number of millionaires his firm has helped to create at 93.)
“We have tried to be innovative in as few ways as possible,” Bahat says. Best to leave the innovation for the startups.
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