1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

Eric Benhamou is Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on where you are in terms of the fund. What fund are you on? What is the size of the fund? What is the fund strategy now?

Eric Benhamou: There is more than one fund now. We now have four active funds. Two of them are fully invested. The last one is still being raised. We are about two-thirds of the way.

In total, we have $300 million to $350 million in investments. We help and manage these companies from all over the world and for the first time, we have to formalize our investor relations program. We keep in touch with all these investors and they are not all the same so we have a small investor relations group inside BGV to help us continue the growth.

That is approximately the size of the fund. We don’t expect it to be much bigger than this because if we cross a certain threshold, then what we do will fundamentally change. We are at our optimum size at the moment.

The focus of the firm has not changed. We added a few nuances along the way, but basically, we focus on young companies who drive the digital transformation of enterprises around the world. That is true across all vertical sectors.

More specifically in our fund four, we focus on what we call enterprise full pointer companies. These companies are different from the companies that we have considered from a decade ago. These companies have AI at the core. They leverage new datasets. They tend to be solution-oriented as opposed to components-oriented.

They typically deploy solutions in the form of intelligent automated workflows that fundamentally disrupt and improve the economics of vertical sectors. These solutions tend to be adopted not centrally but in business units, divisions, and plants. That makes them attractive from a VC perspective because the decision-making process is easier to deal with. It is faster and it is conducive to generate venture returns.

We found that these companies exist all around the world. These companies are not born in Silicon Valley; these companies are in geographies thousands of miles away from here. We try to intercept them on that journey. They end up looking like global companies with a Silicon Valley face. That is what BGV is about today. 

Sramana Mitra: Double-click on a few different points. Let’s talk about check sizes. Where are you looking to come in? What level of validation needs to exist before you are willing to write those checks? What check sizes are interested in writing?

Eric Benhamou: I’ll describe the sweet spot and variations around that. The sweet spot of intercepting companies is when they have the first product out in the hands of customers. They may or may not be paying customers yet, but they are engaged enough where we can verify the signs of product-market fit.

Our mandate is to not dictate huge technology risks. We want to make sure that the technology fundamentally works. We are prepared to underwrite all the other risks such as marketing, company building, and so on. In general, these are what you would call Series C or Series A companies. That is roughly the stage in which we invest.

We typically lead with $3 million to $5 million checks. Sometimes, we go upstream, and we intercept companies even before they have their first products out either because we were convinced of what they are doing or we know the entrepreneur team. There are reasons for us to mitigate that risk of going upstream. When we do that, we start with a $250,000 check.

When we stay with companies all the way through, we end up investing $15 million to $20 million. We don’t drop companies when we get to the late stage. We stay with them all the way. We describe ourselves as early-stage because that is fundamentally different from what growth stage or expansion stage firms are. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021
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