Roy Bahat has been head of Bloomberg Beta, a venture capital firm backed solely by media company Bloomberg, for more than nine years. Bloomberg Beta is currently investing out of its third $75m fund – established in 2019 – with a focus on the future of work and machine intelligence in particular.
At the time the unit closed its second $75m fund in July 2016, Bahat said: “Bloomberg was one of the original technology startups when Michael Bloomberg founded the company in 1981, and we try to carry that spirit in Bloomberg Beta.”
He added: “We run our fund in unorthodox ways to build trust with founders: We’re a corporate-backed fund that invests to make money. We experiment with the limits of transparency — instead of a normal website, we open sourced our entire operating manual. We measure success by our founders’ customer service ratings of us.”
Since being set up in 2013, Bloomberg Beta has made more than 230 investments and has realised 30 exits. In recent months, the fund has invested in visual work communication tool CloudApp, onboarding automation service Wrangle and Sounding Board, a virtual leadership development platform.
Prior to taking over at Bloomberg Beta, Bahat was founder and chairman of gaming console company Ouya, which was sold to Razer in 2015. He was previously president of IGN Entertainment and a vice-president at media group News Corporation. He was also director of strategy for NYC2012, the ultimately unsuccessful bid by New York City to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
Bahat has a master of philosophy in economics from Oxford University and he read social studies at Harvard University.
