Laurel Bowden had been trying for years to meet Romain Moulin, the elusive CEO of Exotec, a French robotics company — but he maintained a low profile and rarely took meetings with venture capitalists.
“Good for him. I still have to beg him,” says Bowden, the London-based partner at early-stage venture capital firm 83North. But at the time, she wasn’t so sanguine. Bowden was determined to back Moulin and his co-founders, who developed robots that could climb warehouse racks and retrieve products. The firm already had a long list of successful retail investments, including Hybris, a website infrastructure company; and Mirakl, which helps any retailer become a marketplace.
“This was robotics for retail, so another part of the story,” she adds. Still, she couldn’t get Moulin to take a call.
Until Covid.
Just before the pandemic hit, Exotec decided to raise money.
Bowden, one of four partners of the firm, scrambled to find a way to get to France just as borders began to close and mobilized her network of CEOs to start calling Moulin and make the case for 83North. “I was the only VC that got to see them in person,” she told me.
Meanwhile, back in Tel Aviv, partner Gil Goren was mounting his own campaign. He asked Michael Dell, whom he knew from his days at EMC, to call Moulin and persuade him to take the firm’s money. “And he did it. We don’t take no for an answer.”
(Goren later spilled that Bowden chartered a jet, even though he had tried the same. Israel wouldn’t let him leave, and the French told him they wouldn’t let him off any plane.)
When Bowden finally met the CEO in Lille, he said he wanted $60 to $70 million, far more money than 83North would generally put into a first investment. But the partners had conviction in the company and decided to underwrite the entire round to try to win the deal.
“We didn’t want to do it all, but we took the risk and made sure Exotec got the full amount it wanted,” says Bowden, who grew up in South Africa and is now one of the few high-profile women in VC.
Arnon Dinur, who focuses primarily on consumer and retail companies and lives near Tel Aviv, notes that deals for the best companies are almost always fiercely competitive. With only four partners, by design, the firm has to do everything it can to break through.
“Our No. 1 leverage is our other CEOs. We can show off all we want about how good we are etc., etc. But what eventually counts is when we say, ‘Pick up the phone and call this CEO,’” says Dinur. Goren quips that the network allows the firm to arrive “before the vultures.”
The firm won the deal. Other investors, including a number of its own company founders andDell Technologies Capital, joined later. Exotec, now worth $2 billion, is France’s first industrial unicorn.
83North, a $2.2 billion VC firm that invests in startups across Israel and Europe, takes an unconventional approach, including staying small and putting its full weight behind a limited number of companies. It’s long been a formidable competitor to the largest firms that have dozens of partners and analysts and name brands that do a lot of the work in and of themselves to lure entrepreneurs and the biggest investors.
Performance has followed: 83North ranks in the top 5 percent of venture firms, according to documents reviewed by Institutional Investor.
Over the past 19 years, Bowden, Dinur, Goren, and Yoram Snir, have created 14 unicorns and have differentiated themselves from competitors by making some rare decisions. For one, they chose to be equal partners, sharing in the upside and downside of every company — a move that ensures they all get deeply involved with every founder.
“Entrepreneurs hate two things: slow processes and not talking to decision-makers,” adds Dinur. “How do you do that with large funds? Some of our peers, you meet the partner, then the CEO has to work with principals and analysts and all these titles that even after 20 years I don’t know what they do.” At 83North, the partners themselves do the analysis and, with no bureaucracy, move quickly. As Snir says, they “hunt in a pack.”
Roy Tuvey, who is working with 83North for the second time, this time as co-founder of Vertice, doesn’t always know what those other folks do, either. He describes the firm as unusually personal and decisive in a venture world often bogged down by layers of management.
“I’ve been on calls with 50 people and 50 windows on Zoom, associates talking on treadmills,” he says. “It doesn’t feel personal or like you’re talking to the source of truth,” adds Tuvey, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Wandera, which 83North backed, and ScanSafe, which was bought by Cisco. In two different cases with other firms over the years, one VC partner would commit to terms that their investment committees would put the kibosh on three weeks later. With 83North, “if you hear something you can take it for granted.”
The firm’s model extends to its investors. 83North — named for the combined latitude of London and Tel Aviv — keeps a tight circle of investors, including Amherst College and Commonfund, which have become close advisers and partners.
In 2018, when the partners wanted to launch a fund to support breakout companies like Exotec, Andrew Golden, the now retired president of Princeton Investment Management Co., who now advises and coaches several investment firms and serves on numerous boards, and Ben Gomez, managing director of Pilot House, a single-family office, both supported the idea and committed money over the phone. The firm closed the fund in 10 days.
The first time the firm invested in a larger startup was when Mirakl, a company it had been backing since 2015, was raising a bigger round a few years later.
At the time, “We said, ‘Hang on a second, why are we not investing a significant amount in this round? We love the business. If we can put in $20 million, why are we putting in 5?’” says Bowden, who started her career at GE Capital in London before spending six years at an Israeli venture fund. 83North has since plowed large sums into several of its highest-conviction investments.
The strategy is possible because the firm has 15 investors, not the typical 50 or 60. And of the 15, there’s a core handful. Dinur says that’s powerful, but it can be risky. “If you have three or four major LPs and for some reason they don’t want to participate, it’s very hard to recover from that.”
83North is now making its rarest move yet: It’s not raising another fund. There is no succession plan. The partners are essentially closing the business side of the firm. That almost never happens. (To be clear, they will continue working with their founders for the next 10, 12 or 20 years — however long it takes — and deploy the $400 million still in the eleventh and last fund.
I thought back to the scores of investors who have called me over the years after starting their own firms, many of them vowing to cap the size of their funds or share equity more broadly than they could at a big manager. All in an effort to safeguard their ability to generate the best returns, they told me. Almost all of them eventually caved. They sold stakes, expanded to please their new owners, or started “institutionalizing,” jargon for turning a founder-led firm into a corporation.
Venture capital is dominated by a small roster of huge multigenerational firms that turn startups into profitable companies and by megafunds that have consistently generated top returns for decades. A few have been surprisingly successful at succession. But outside the top 20 percent, the majority of VC firms have mediocre track records, with many closing shop after two or three funds. That’s why investors who can’t get into the top funds rarely get returns that match the promise. The industry’s struggles since 2023 after interest rates spiked, exits dwindled, and VCs were left with companies they bought at high valuations during the pandemic have only made it worse.
The decision to step back comes at a time when the size of managers, whether in VC, private equity, real estate and other investments, has exploded. An entire industry flush with capital has grown up to offer investment managers canned succession plans, money to scale, and fundraising machines.
“In the last 15, 20 years funds became so big,” says Snir, who focuses on enterprise IT infrastructure, cloud technologies and communication. “We’ve been fighting this in an explicit way. We wanted to make sure that we were a small fund making a small number of investments, doing it slowly, never more than four or five partners.”
Gomez says it’s rare to “raise a last fund” because of the economic incentives of the business. “The most profitable thing for them to do is to hire associates and principals, to have those people graduate to partner level, and to have the firm continue for decades,” Gomez says. The founding partners then get a share of the incentive fees, or carry. Or they can find a buyer. Pilot House was founded in 1998 to manage the wealth created when Continental Cablevision, the largest cable company at the time, was sold.
“Either way, you cash out the brand of the business, whether it’s through 20 or 30 years of carry or whether it’s through a buyout.” Gomez hesitates: “I have to think about the way to say this… They are fundamentally not greedy.” While Gomez’s “not greedy” sentiment was echoed by many people I talked to, the partners of successful VC firms are very, very rich. But it’s still refreshing to hear in a world where the compensation of the people at the top of investment firms is often equivalent to the GDP of many countries.
Gomez stresses that the 83North brand has enormous equity value from its long-term track record, its influence in VC and on boards, and its ability to easily raise money. 83North raised that final fund in one of the toughest-ever environments for venture capital. “They’ve decided to walk away from that. I give them a ton of credit,” he says.
Letitia Johnson, CIO of Amherst College, says she admires the way the partners have chosen to build the firm, including opting not to do succession, which is the most lucrative path for them but not necessarily for their investors. “They don’t want to do those other things because they think it will result in deteriorating returns,” she says.
After interviews with more than 30 people close to the firm, the rationale behind 83North’s decision began to shed light on what has become standard practice in the industry: There are few debates about the challenges of building a multigenerational firm, and people on all sides of the business rarely question the conventional wisdom about succession, the importance of firm structure and who benefits from it.
The path may be unusual for the industry, but it tracks with decisions 83North has made all along the way. They never set out to build a machine.
In 2006, Snir, Erez Ofer, and Moshe Mor, partners at Greylock who were in the U.S. at the time, launched a $150 million fund to invest in Israel. Greylock was one of many U.S. firms making their first forays into the country, hoping to capitalize on Israel’s burgeoning tech sector and VC industry.
Greylock Israel hired Bowden and Dinur in 2008, both part-time. Bowden left the Israeli VC firm two years earlier after it struggled with succession, including how to bring in and integrate partners at different levels and how to delegate authority. Bowden says she wasn’t going to join another firm until she really got to know the people and the structure.
Dinur came from the other side, starting out, he says, as a “failed entrepreneur. That built some of my cynicism about success, luck, tech. I’ve seen the whole cycle.” Then he joined M-Systems, which invented the USB flash drive. As a senior executive, he watched it go from zero to $1 billion and saw what it took to ultimately succeed. Then he got an offer to be a part-time partner at Greylock Israel until he figured out what he wanted to do.
Greylock Israel was always a small, noncore experiment inside the firm, as the U.S. funds chased billion-dollar exits such as Facebook. Even when the group’s second fund grew to $160 million, it was a rounding error on the billions Greylock was raising in the States. “I think they liked us but didn’t give a damn about us,” Bowden says.
The partners decided to spin off — but now had to go back to every investor and ask if they’d stick around without the Greylock brand.
Golden was the first stop. He says he didn’t hesitate to say yes because 83North had already racked up huge wins, such as Just Eat, a food delivery business, and ScaleIO, a software for storage business that was sold to EMC, and had already demonstrated what he calls “real moral fiber.” After one of the GPs left, for instance, 83North decided to shrink the fund size based on the amount it thought a partner could properly deploy. “Talk about explaining what your motivations are,” Golden says. Other investors followed.
The partners faced another question from everyone: Would the four of you stay together? “That’s where most firms go off the rails,” Golden says.
Bowden remembers it clearly. “We had to look in the mirror and answer that. Of course, we said yes. But I don’t think we really knew.” What they did know was that they wanted to keep investing in Israel and Europe. And that they didn’t want to copy someone else’s playbook, even Greylock’s.
After Mor left, the partners made the decision to be equal and share compensation — and thus decision-making — a move that removed the usual politics from inside the firm and fostered friendships between the partners. Over time, Goren, who joined the firm when it was raising its fourth fund and after Ofer left, says it became clear that people felt it externally as well. They saw that “it's not a competition between your companies and your success.”
Snir, who was with Cisco and ClassData before joining Greylock in 2005, says, founders “want to make sure the whole partnership is behind them,” rather than just the one who brought the deal to the firm and is on the board.
But the equal partnership forced the succession issue to the surface right away. If they hired junior people to grow them into partners someday, they would no longer be equal — by definition. “At some point, we needed to decide whether we're going to stay equal, we're going to stand behind our principles there, or we're going to keep the brand going, bring junior people in, and grow the team and do what everyone else around is doing,” Goren tells me.
The firm got an enormous boost from its investors, who are part of a small group that has been able to do what David Swensen did for Yale University's endowment: get one of the very first calls from brilliant new investment teams.
Gomez explains his own investment strategy well: to build a concentrated portfolio with the best firms in the world. But to get one of those coveted first calls requires real relationships and a history of being a valuable partner.
“The game isn’t about me being a brilliant investor. The game is about me getting access to the best funds.” Even with a head start — Continental Cablevision was a VC-backed company with relationships with some of the best — Gomez spent the first 10 years building his reputation as an LP.
Being a good partner also requires passion. When a CEO was interested in joining as a partner in London but expressed concern about the 83North’s small size and whether that said something about its financial wherewithal, Golden flew to London, where he had long thought the firm should expand. “I'm flying over there saying, ‘I'm responsible for $25 billion and I'm telling you, this firm is going to be in the lifeboat with me no matter what,’” he says.
Over time, the question of succession started coming up anew. “We really liked working with entrepreneurs and chasing deals,” Dinur says. “And then you start realizing that in many funds most of the time is being spent elsewhere, fundraising, HR reviews. So No. 1: where is the passion? And 2, none of us think we’re amazing at managing, at building this next generation.”
Of course, there are plenty of good reasons VCs don’t call it quits – and many are successful at giving their firms life after the founders leave.
Asaf Horesh of Vintage Investment Partners, which backs early-stage managers (83North is part of its funds of funds) and also invests directly through secondaries and co-investments, is now overseeing a generational handoff from founder Alan Feld to himself and another partner. A decade ago, Feld resolved to plan ahead after watching peers fail at succession and shut their doors.
Horesh says succession works only if the founders can cede power and enough of the economics that it makes sense for a new generation. Having started his career at 83North, he has seen both ends of the succession spectrum. “Where it breaks down is when it’s all just talk,” he says. Horesh says that even when a founder is committed to the right approach, it takes serious planning and effort to manage the partnership and mentor people to take over. “I’m the biggest beneficiary, but it’s a tough process to go through. It takes planning, real mentoring, and a lot of work to make it stick.”
Johnson, the Amherst CIO, says succession is an art. “You have to ask: What do you want to spend your time on? What are you good at?” she says. “If you want to build the next generation and have that skill, that’s terrific.”
83North’s partners chose to stay focused on what they loved: investing. “Supporting founders. Working directly with companies through good times and bad.” That decision, she argues, “is both rare and underappreciated.”
Johnson places a major emphasis on how managers structure their firms. “We back people who can make really good judgments on our behalf,” Johnson tells me, “both in terms of investment decisions and in terms of how they fund and build their firms.”
On the how-they-build-their firms part, Johnson says she doesn’t like strategies like GP stakes and recounts someone telling her they understood why people sell an interest when they have a lot of ownership concentrated at the top of a firm.
“My response to that is that I’m only going to invest with people who distribute ownership and actually have a team who is good enough that they can distribute ownership.” If she misses out on some great investors who don’t do that, so be it.
Unfortunately, she says, the industry has moved in this direction. “We’re looking for endurance and alignment in our managers, and I don’t think you get that if you set yourself up so that you have to sell a stake to actually move on.”
All the talk about succession and incentives masks what Amherst ultimately wants: partners who are obsessed with the craft of investing. During 2022 and 2023, Johnson asked both a public equity manager and a venture manager how they were holding up. The “answer was, ‘What else would I do?’ Like, ‘This is what I do and I don’t want to do anything else.’ The only way to get that in a high-quality way is to find people that haven’t done everything to maximize their comp. The temptation when things are going bad is to punch out. ‘I’m rich enough.’ And that will ruin things for you: punching out at the wrong time.”
Bowden, Dinur, Goren, and Snir kept the firm small so they could be choosy and back only founders they had the highest conviction about — and who they liked.
That matters given the tough path and long time horizon of most startups. “Founders love them, which is ultimately how they make non-consensus bets,” says Johnson.
Working with founders in the early stages can sometimes look improvisational, or at least unorthodox. That’s because these are young companies breathed into life by people with great ideas.
When the pandemic shut down almost everything in March 2020, Daniel Ramot, co-founder of Via Transportation, was in the rideshare business, shuttling people willing to share rides with other passengers around cities like New York, London and Washington.
“But no one was moving, let alone getting into the same vehicle,” Ramot says. “That was a moment!”
Ramot, who has a PhD in neuroscience and helped build supercomputers for drug discovery at D.E. Shaw Research before starting Via in 2012 (83North invested in 2014), was also in the middle of raising money, a round he thought would be easy only two months before — until Covid cases started surging.
Dinur was in Antarctica and unreachable. Bowden had to jump in, take Dinur’s seat on the board and negotiate what turned out to be a complex round with a new lead investor, Exor, a process that included setting some hard terms.
“The company was with its back against the wall doing a round that was really tough,” Dinur says.
83North came through at other times. Two years ago, when Ramot didn’t like the control terms other backers offered, 83North quickly decided to invest at the same valuation but without terms that limited the founder’s control over the company. “If you’ve got a great founder, don’t micromanage. Trust why you backed him in the first place,” Dinur says, adding that it was a critical round to get right, including the capital structure, to set the company up for a clean IPO.
There have been many calls along the way. The pandemic initially pummeled Via, but it also forced Ramot to change the business from a consumer-facing rideshare company that had fierce competition to one offering enterprise software to transit and other systems. With cities buckling under cost, safety and other pressures from the lockdown, government officials were suddenly keen on using Via’s software to manage their public transportation systems. Via went public on Sept. 8, raising $493 million, and putting its market cap close to $4 billion.
Over the course of my reporting, I heard many variations on the same story: 83North showing up when it mattered most — not just in the celebratory stages of a startup’s arc but at the times when conviction is tested. It also turned relationships with founders into friendships.
Renen Hallak, CEO of Vast Data, an AI infrastructure platform that could become one of the most valuable AI startups after raising billions from Nvidia and others in a high-profile round in August, tells me he has asked the firm for what he cheerfully calls “a string of unreasonable things” over the past decade. Hallak wanted 83North to put up $20 million in a round (again, during the pandemic) to send a signal to the market — even though the company had already reached unicorn status and was far past the firm’s early-stage mandate. (Only later did Hallak learn that 83North came up with the money after going back to its investors.) When rounds were oversubscribed, he asked the firm to hold back on allocations it was entitled to. When he needed a senior position filled quickly, Bowden got on a plane to New York to meet the candidate face-to-face. “It was during the hardest times when they stepped up. Those are the people you want to go to war with,” Hallak says.
Term sheets from other funds have often been complex and opaque. “Things you need to decipher on how they will take more profit through this and that mechanism. There are all kinds of ways where investors get preference over common shareholders — which is me and employees.” 83North’s terms were straightforward. In fact, most term sheets at the time included share clawbacks if the founder left in the first four years. “Yoram said, ‘We’re not going to do that. I don’t expect you to leave ever.’ Ten years later, and I’m still here.”
Adrien Nussenbaum's story echoes Hallak's, albeit in a different tone. When I reach Nussenbaum, the charismatic French co-founder of Mirakl, tells me (almost) everything.
I wait while he scrolls back through a WhatsApp thread looking for his conversation with Bowden about adding financial services to part of his strategy to keep the company fresh. “Obviously becoming a bank is a very crazy undertaking,” he says, still searching for what he wants to show me.
He finds it. “I’m carving out a separate business and fundraising half a billion dollars. Are you in?” he reads.
“Probably not,” Bowden replies.
“Why? Too bad for you. XYZ is in.” (XYZ is obviously for my benefit.)
“I don’t operate by FOMO,” came the answer from Bowden.
She added that even Amazon had abandoned its banking ambitions and that he should partner with an existing bank or fintech rather than build one from scratch. “Don’t do it yourself,” she wrote.
After needling Bowden about being “grumpy,” “mean,” and “having lost her passion,” Nussenbaum and Bowden got into the details of offering financial services on the platform.
“Obviously, I was teasing her,” he tells me. The back-and-forth helps him think.
Nussenbaum didn’t end up launching the bank. He did, however, take her advice. Bowden quickly arranged a call with Ebury and BlueVine, two fintechs in the portfolio.
Before you can love founders, you have to win them.
Hallak is the kind of entrepreneur VCs started circling when they learned he left EMC soon after the company bought XtremIO, where he was head of R&D. To get a meeting with Hallak, Snir called Goren, who was not yet a partner at 83North. Goren, an investor in XtremIO, had known Hallak since 2008 and had long thought about starting some kind of company with him. Snir also called in help from people from XtremIO, where he was on the board.
At the same time, Hallak was looking for the right VC. He “didn’t like any” of those courting him, so he turned to two friends, including Goren, to ask who they would want to work with. Both referred him to Snir.
“For the first time, I met an investor who didn’t feel like an investor,” Hallak told me about meeting Snir. “Everyone else was talking about exit strategies and how they were going to sell the company. The company didn’t exist yet! I didn’t understand what they were talking about.”
Adds Hallak: “Yoram? He talked to me like he was joining the team: ‘What’s our operating plan?’ ‘How will we build?’ ‘Which markets are we going after?’ ‘Who can I introduce you to figure out the hard parts?’ I immediately said, ‘I want to work with this guy.’”
Sometimes 83North saw what others overlooked. Wolt was one.
83North backed Wolt in late 2017 after nearly every investor had passed. Miki Kuusi, the founder, had made food delivery work in Helsinki — a city with high labor costs, no tipping culture, freezing weather and spread-out neighborhoods that required couriers to drive cars, not scooters.
“This model doesn’t work,” Kuusi heard again and again. “Even if you make money, Uber will kill you.”
After hearing Kuusi practice his pitch at a chance meeting, Horesh introduced him to Bowden, who had invested in Just Eat, which went public in 2016, and knew the food delivery business as well as anyone.
Within a day, Kuusi got a call from a British number. It was Bowden and Dinur. “Miki, I’ve seen your numbers,” Bowden told him. “They can’t be real.”
Just Eat had concluded that the logistics-enabled model — with its high complexity and thin margins — simply didn’t work. Bowden and Dinur had looked at dozens of delivery startups in the U.S. over the years and never found one where the math added up. Until now.
Within a week, 83North signed a deal to invest.
I pressed the partners — and later other VCs who ran through various startup origin stories with me — on what they saw that made them chase after Via; Vast Data;Marqeta, the payment platform that was the firm’s largest exit until Via; Celonis, a German software company; FiveSigma, Wiliot; Podimo; Lendbuzz, which may soon go public; and scores of others. With every press I got new and thoughtful answers. But nothing that seemed easy to pass on to a new generation.
There were many seemingly small things. As we talked more about Wolt, Dinur brought up another question he asks himself as he looks into companies: Would he back the people reporting to this founder if they launched a startup themselves? In Kuusi’s case, the answer was yes. Many of Kuusi’s early hires now hold senior roles at DoorDash, which acquired Wolt for $8 billion in 2021. Bowden says just having a successful food delivery business in a place like Helsinki was enough to make her want to know more about the startup.
Dinur says so much is about people. “If you look at some of our biggest wins, it’s the stuff that was done by exceptional entrepreneurs after we invested.”
Take Via. “It doesn’t matter how much we analyze the numbers. The company that started as a B2C company is now a B2B software company. Which model would have captured that? We knew Daniel was a superstar, so when something happens five years down the road, he will react. Now how do you to judge that?”
For a succession plan to work, founders need to find people who can replace them and deliver strong returns to investors by — among many other things — forging similar relationships with entrepreneurs. And similar returns in VC means finding and fostering a few outrageous winners. “Our mindset is can we make a Via go public, and a Vast go public. That’s the business, the only thing that matters,” Dinur says.
You only have a chance of passing that intelligence along if partners spend a substantial chunk of their time mentoring another generation.
“And this is absolutely what we don’t want to do, none of us. And take some of the magic in the fact that we are so small go away.”
Interrupting Bowden during another call with the two of them, Dinur laughs and says, “We might have made a big mistake also. I got a call — Laurel, I didn’t tell you this — I got a call two hours ago from a big fund. He said, ‘Arnon, we are looking for a junior GP, you guys were a great school. When I said, ‘What do you mean?’ he started going through all the principals that we had and where they are today. He walked me through four names, and I’m like ‘OK, they are pretty good people, maybe we could have done succession!’”
But, he is quick to add, “even that, the fact that they are great, will they be great under us? I look at Sequoia and Benchmark, it’s magic, just magic, I mean come on, they have done a phenomenal job, this is the third generation of people — but I don’t know many others.”
When I talked to Hallak, he said he hadn’t heard the “rumors” about 83North not having a succession plan. He was surprised. But he quickly gave me his explanation. “It goes back to the incentives. They like that equal-partner approach," and that wouldn't work if they hired junior people and just sat back to collect the money.
“That means they will also do the next chapter differently.”
Golden believes 83North’s decision deserves attention. He says one of his many mantras, “Good clients make for good architects and for good investment managers,” is easier to understand through the prism of a firm like 83North because it's not run-of-the-mill. “I get tired of not just allocators, but even VC managers who think that they really know the path to success, because now there are so many data points of successful venture capital firms that they figure, ‘We’ll torture that data and see what the commonalities are.’
“But sometimes it's the exceptions that give you a better way to get there.”
