Sergio Escobar leads BCF Ventures, Canada-based law firm BCF Business Law’s corporate venture capital (CVC) arm, as chief executive and partner. Escobar launched the unit in May 2018.
BCF Ventures was one of the first world’s CVC units in the legal sector. It benefits from the expertise, resources and insights of the parent firm as well as other notable advisers and invests jointly with other funds across North America.
Among BCF Ventures’ portfolio companies, we have legal software developer Athennian, boxing equipment and fitness media company FightCamp, on-demand freight marketplace FleetOps, and digital health compliance software Medstack. Existing exits are Adracare, a digital health platform which was acquired by Well Health, IT cost management service Alpin, which was bought by CoreView and enterprise sales management platform Prospectify acquired by AngelList.
Escobar said BCF Ventures is the only Canadian VC firm to maintain a funding partnership to foster incubation and acceleration for supply chain startups with Canada’s Scale AI supercluster – a co-investment and innovation hub with government funding matched by contributions from the private sector. “As the hub of Canada’s artificial intelligence ecosystem, Scale AI offers funding, expert guidance and a community of like-minded peers for artificial intelligence projects to entice corporations to adopt the latest AI technology,” he explained.
In 2021, BCF Ventures experimented the implementation of the CVC-as-a-service model to open and manage new funds in partnership with Corporations and Family Offices. One of the clients of BCF Business Law Firm, a Canadian-Israeli family office, granted a mandate to both the law firm and the CVC unit to structure, set-up and operate an in-house VC fund for their family office. This new fund, branded as Lalotte Ventures, is an early-stage fund that is actively investing across US, Canada, Western Europe and Israel mainly in sports, media and entertainment.
