MBA Ventures Q4 2023 Update
The VC for top MBAs
Dear Friends of MBA Ventures,
Happy New Year! It has been an exciting last few months as we continue to grow our portfolio and community in the MBA ecosystem. As a quick reminder to those new to this distribution, MBA Ventures is a global early-stage VC fund and network committed to backing MBA student and alumni founders from top-tier schools.
In this issue you will find the following:
💸 Investments: summary of our Q4 deals
🌀 Our 5-Year Vision and Plan
📈 Q4 MBA Pitch Competition Winners
👩🎓🧑🏽🎓 Scout Program: find out how to work with us (for current MBA students)
Cheers,
Clark & Monica
💸 Q4 2023 Investments
🤖 Piper, co-founded by Sergio Gonzalez, Rodrigo Burillo, both Berkeley MBA graduates, and Michele Trevisiol, is a Spain-based, full pipeline automation solution that empowers sales teams by delivering unmatched productivity gains and sales intelligence. Stage: pre-seed. Notable co-investors: Seaya, Shilling, Ignia.
🏗 LeanCon (stealth), founded by Ziv Levi, Yale MBA, and Sapir Tubul, is a US-based AI-powered software to generate construction plans and optimize project management for construction companies and real estate developers. Stage: pre-seed. Notable co-investors: Fusion VC.
🔢 Mentium.io, co-founded by Aziz Satarov, MIT MBA, and Matthieu BERGER, is a US-based AI powered end-to-end revenue management platform. Stage: pre-seed. Notable co-investors: Antler.
📰 Riple, co-founded by Chris Haoxin Xu, London Business School MBA graduate and Anupam Ghosal, is a UK based AI-powered news platform that delivers 100-word summaries of global news, tailored to users in a personalized feed, allowing them to engage and share opinions. Stage: pre-seed. Notable co-investors: YUVIDIGITAL WORLDWIDE LTD.
🕸 Blerify, co-founded by Marcos Allende López, Sergio Cerón Figueroa and Andrew A. Piscione, MIT MBA graduate, spun off the Inter American Development Bank as a revolutionary verification infrastructure platform that offers secure, private, and efficient digital interactions among enterprises, government entities, and people in LATAM and the Caribbean. Stage: pre-seed. Notable co-investors: ParaFi Capital.
🛒 Jupiter, co-founded by Chad Monroe, Stanford MBA, and Anuraaug Naalapati, is a US-based creator-first recipe and grocery shopping platform. Using Jupiter, creators host stores where they share and monetize recipe content, maximize brand partnerships, and build community. Stage: seed. Notable co-investors: YC, NfX, Khosla Ventures.
🌀 5 Year Plan
At MBA Ventures, we believe in the vitality of the MBA community.
Our strategy is simple: we are a sector-geography agnostic venture capital fund, focusing on providing pre-seed & seed capital to the most promising startups that have an MBA student or alumni in their founding team. Beyond investment, we are building a community that bridges the best and brightest MBA profiles around the world.
Being a successful founder requires drive, perseverance, consistent high performance in a challenging environment, teamwork, and a robust network. We believe that obtaining an MBA from a top program is a strong data point indicating these traits. Moreover, it is a mini due diligence in itself, as admission to such programs requires demonstrating a proven track record of success.
29% of US-based VC-backed unicorns have at least one MBA founder (25% globally).
We are establishing our brand to be deeply embedded in the global MBA community to generate proprietary deal flow through three major sourcing channels:
Scouting Program: our competitive on-campus program encourages MBA students seeking VC exposure to share deal flow from their respective networks in exchange for carry and VC experience.
Co-investment Partners: we invest alongside university and/or sector specific early-stage funds to close out rounds that they are leading in the top MBA founders across all sectors, and geographies. To date we have co-invested alongside top VCs including Sequoia, Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Accel, and Lightspeed.
Offline Ecosystem: we host or participate in MBA startup competitions and on-campus/hub events.
The key to our model is our ability to secure allocation in the best deals, and this is a direct result of our elite cross-MBA founder community. Rather than competing with the well-established VCs, we strategically co-invest alongside them checks of ∼$50k. MBA founders aspire to tap into the global network of top MBA counterparts, resulting in scenarios where they are asking their lead investors to include us in the deal for broader MBA community access.
Investing in MBA Ventures grants LPs access to an exclusive network of MBA founders. Additionally, LPs have the opportunity for direct investment in deals with allocations in the same round or follow-ons through SPVs in subsequent rounds for top-performing startups. As General Partners of MBA Ventures, we are incentivized and aligned with LPs over the long term. Our Management fee is 2% during the investment period (5 years) and 1.5% thereafter (5 years), resulting in an annualized fee of 1.75% over the lifecycle of the fund (10 years).
We have three primary LP profiles:
Fund of Funds: investing in emerging managers with our niche MBA angle.
Family Offices: diversifying their early stage venture allocation by investing in MBA founder thesis, creating an opportunity to cherry pick and direct invest in their favorite deals.
Angels (including MBA alumni): writing fund tickets to then gain access to the MBA community and to direct investments into deals outside of their network/geography.
Our vision: over 5 years we plan to close two funds: Fund I ($5MM) and Fund II ($40MM) to reach $45MM in AUM. As we move to Fund II, we will increase the check size and reserve capital for follow-ons to increase allocation. Overtime, MBA Ventures will become the stamp of approval for any top MBA founded team launching a startup.
📈 NYC Q4 MBA Startup Pitch Competition
On November 16th we hosted an MBA Pitch Competition event in New York City with our partner the Orca Network at the Barclay’s Rise space. Over 150 MBA-founded startups applied and the 5 top finalists pitched for an investment of $50K investment from MBA Ventures. The two winners of the competition were Riple and Mentium.io.
👩🎓🧑🏽🎓 Scout Program
We now have over 25 Investment Partner Scouts, who are current MBA Students at top programs helping us source deals and participating in the investment process. If you are a current MBA student at a top program who is interested in VC and learning more about our Scout Program, click here.
P.S. to learn more about MBA Ventures, feel free to reach out to us directly at clark@mba-ventures.com or monica@mba-ventures.com.