

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.”
![]() 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 |