Covid & how our portfolio companies are helping
Why us
Benson Oak Ventures brings a disciplined and differentiated investment approach, predicated on prudence and patience with the goal of doubling and tripling down as the winners emerge.
We focus solely on companies that can build and scale their brand to a global mass market, targeting consumers, SMB’s and passionware, i.e. all things around the Passion Economy.
Approach
Entrepreneur Focus = Focused Entrepreneur
Entrepreneur Focus = Focused Entrepreneur
At the early stages of a company the founder is constantly dealing with fundraising. Our goal is to build deep trust relationships with our entrepreneurs, invest early and double down on the company in the following round. Seed and A stages are riddled with challenges and are the riskiest stage of the company. We believe the founders should focus on building product market fit rather than constant fundraising.
Announcing the BOV Founder Carry Program.
We will allocate a pool of the GP carried interest for the benefit of portfolio company Founders. Every BOV founder will thus effectively have an ownership interest in the Fund and each portfolio company -- thereby emphasizing our “founder-first” approach, and encouraging support for entrepreneurs across the portfolio.Our Focus
Benson Oak Ventures brings a disciplined and differentiated investment approach, predicated on prudence and patience with the goal of doubling and tripling down as the winners emerge.
Companies that can build sustainable businesses and scale their brand to a global mass market, targeting consumers and SMB’s. We invest from early seed, late seed through Series A.
B2C
Our B2C focus includes EdTech, Sports & Lifestyle and FinTech & Crypto. We see these fields as areas particularly ripe for disruption leveraging technical prowess, great user experience and innovative business models.
Digital SMB
Using technology to take out the friction from common business cases with a focus on sticky services not previously available to SMB's.
Passion Economy
"Passion-ware" are tools enabling the creation of products and services stemming from people’s own creativity. These new wave of tools enable everyone to be an entrepreneur, run their business to earn a living and at the same time, chase their passions.
Benson Oak Ventures fund is the 4th venture-focused fund in the Benson Oak ecosystem, encompassing 20 years of experience across industries. Previous funds having invested in over 30 start-ups (direct and co-investments) and returned about $500M in value to investors.
Previous and current Benson Oak investments include global companies: AVG (the global leader in Internet Security delivering over 100x return to investors upon its IPO); Promo.com (#1 player in video marketing solutions for SMBs); LoungeBuddy (the leading app for airport lounge access, recently sold to American Express).
Inception Stories
AVG Security
Investment Highlights & Value Add
History
Benson Oak bought AVG in 2004 when it was a 20 person team in Brno, Czech Republic and became actively involved in assisting the management of the Company. At the time, AVG had $5M in revenue but had just started to offer its anti-virus product for free.
Benson Oak became involved in the operations and especially in developing the freemium model as the company grew to over 100 million users, becoming a global leader in Internet Security solutions for consumers and small businesses. In 2005, Enterprise Investors and Intel Capital bought into AVG in a secondary transaction and in 2009, TA Associates entered. Overall, BOCs investment in AVG returned 100x to its investors as the company exceeded a $1 billion market cap after going public on the NYSE in February 2012.
Highlights
Robert Cohen spearheaded BOC’s acquisition of AVG and was deeply involved in the business for the next 8 years. Aside from being a Board member, Robert also served as interim CFO, managed AVG’s fund raising activities.
In 2011, he joined the senior management team responsible for global M&A and strategic corporate development activity and gained deep operational experience via the execution and integration of five acquisitions and two strategic partnerships, in the US, Germany and Israel. Robert was part of the management team as it went public.
