1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Keith Bank, Founder CEO at KB Partners (Part 1)

Keith Bank is Founder CEO at KB Partners, a venture firm focused on sports technology.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about your background as well as what you’re trying to do with KB Partners.

Keith Bank: I’ve been in the venture business for about 25 years. I started out as an angel investor in the mid-90’s when the Chicago and the Midwest had a real void for early-stage venture money. I did a series of one-off investments with my own money and had some good early success.

I parlayed that into a couple of early-stage tech-focused venture funds. Once those two funds were fully invested and harvested, I went back to my angel investing days. I thought I was better at finding interesting entrepreneurs and did a series of one-off deals with my own capital along with other folks.

We had a good run. A handful of those deals happen to be at the intersection of sports and technology. It’s an area that I’m very passionate about. I’ve always loved sports. The more and more I looked at the landscape, there were very few people doing early-stage investing. I thought it would be an interesting niche.

In late 2017 and early 2018, I decided to get back into the fund business and raised a $41 million early-stage fund. I recruited a few partners to join me and we’ve made 12 investments in that fund. We’re going to be launching a new $100 million fund to continue along the same path. We’ve added a new general partner to that fund. 

Sramana Mitra: Where do you invest? Is it all over the US or all over the world? What’s your geography?

Keith Bank: Our primary focus is US and North America. We’ve made one investment in Europe to date. For anything outside of continental US, we really have to have a much higher bar.

We’re extremely hands-on. We invest in seed and Series A. We’ve opted for the most part to stick to continental US. It’s served us well to date even though there’re a lot of opportunities all over the world.

Sramana Mitra: Are all the partners of KB situated in Chicago?

Keith Bank: They are. We have three partners. We’re focused in the northern suburbs of Chicago. We’re traveling a lot. We have portfolio companies on the West Coast, East Coast, and Midwest. That came to a grinding halt eight or nine months ago.

We’ve been working remotely since then. There’re a lot of highs and lows with sports being cancelled for a while. We were a bit concerned when that started. Most of our portfolio companies were more positively affected than negatively. We have a lot of investments in video streaming, immersive media, and e-sports. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Keith Bank, Founder CEO at KB Partners
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