The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Roy Bahat, Bloomberg Beta

< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

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Roy Bahat
Head
Bloomberg Beta

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.”

The 2015 Fintech Finance 35