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The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Roy Bahat, Bloomberg Beta

No. 32

32
Roy Bahat
Head
Bloomberg Beta

While running OUYA, a set-top-box and game-console company he co-founded in 2012, Roy Bahat says he “saw lots of problems” in the way venture capital worked. “It’s still very clubby and secretive,” the 38-year-old observes. “I’d spend weeks trying to get a meeting.” He set out to do things differently as head of Bloomberg Beta, the $75 million early-stage fund that he helped Bloomberg LP set up in San Francisco in 2013. Openness and diversity are Bloomberg Beta’s credos. The fund posts its “operating manual” — and runs its website — on open-source GitHub, and two of the firm’s six partners are women. Bahat brought another, opportunistic insight to Bloomberg Beta: “The basic machinery of business” was crying out for improvement, he says. “We’ve had so many changes in our personal lives, but the changes haven’t transferred across to the work realm.” Although Bloomberg LP is a financial technology powerhouse, it gave Bloomberg Beta a broad, explicitly nonfintech mandate; Bahat describes the fund’s investment targets as “companies that make work better, from data infrastructure to business applications to professional media and news.” Bahat says the 50-plus checks the fund has issued meet that criterion, though some portfolio companies, such as Seattle-based predictive analytics developer Context Relevant, sell to Wall Street and have technology that is of interest to Bloomberg itself. “The one thing we’re focused on more than anything is machine intelligence, and processes where person and machine work in tandem,” Bahat says. “The Bloomberg terminal is a great example of that happening in the securities industry.”


The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

1. James Robinson III
& James Robinson IV
RRE Ventures
2. Jane Gladstone
Evercore Partners
3. Matthew Harris
Bain Capital Ventures
4. Steven McLaughlin
Financial Technology Partners
5. Jonathan Korngold
General Atlantic
6. Richard Garman &
Brad Bernstein
FTV Capital
7. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park
Anthemis Group
8. Thomas Jessop
Goldman Sachs Group
9. Meyer (Micky) Malka
Ribbit Capital
10. Hans Morris
Nyca Partners
11. Maria Gotsch
Partnership Fund for New York City
12. Marc Andreessen
Andreessen Horowitz
13. Barry Silbert
Digital Currency Group
14. Jay Reinemann
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria
15. Mariano Belinky
Santander InnoVentures
16. François Robinet
AXA Strategic Ventures
17. Vanessa Colella
Citi Ventures
18. Alan Freudenstein & Gregory Grimaldi
Credit Suisse
NEXT Fund
19. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena
SenaHill Partners
20. Rodger Voorhies
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
21. Michael Schlein
Accion International
22. Kenneth Marlin
Marlin & Associates
23. Rumi Morales
CME Ventures
24. Mark Beeston
Illuminate Financial Management
25. Vladislav Solodkiy
Life.SREDA
26. Fabian Vandenreydt
Innotribe SWIFT
27. Derek White
Barclays
28. Alex Batlin
UBS
29. Jeffrey Greenberg
& Vincenzo
La Ruffa
Aquiline Capital Partners
30. P. Howard Edelstein
REDI Holdings
31. Nektarios Liolios
Startupbootcamp FinTech
32. Roy Bahat
Bloomberg Beta
33. Andrew McCormack
Valar Ventures
34. Lawrence Wintermeyer
Innovate Finance
35. Janos Barberis
FinTech Hong Kong

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