An Overview Of Bowery Capital As B2B Marketplace Investors (Loren Chat Clip)

12 Feb 2022 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:21

In this short interview, a Bowery Capital representative (Loren) explains that Bowery is a pure B2B investor focused on software and marketplace companies, primarily at the seed stage. They aim to be one of the first institutional checks and often lead the round, taking a thesis‑driven approach. Beyond capital, Bowery runs an acceleration team that works with portfolio companies between seed and Series A to accelerate revenue growth. The team helps with go‑to‑market strategy, pricing, funnel refinement, transitioning from founder‑led sales to repeatable sales models, and also provides recruiting, talent, and compensation support. Loren notes that Bowery’s first B2B marketplace investment was in 2013 with Transfix and that they have since added several more marketplace deals.

Chapters

Bowery, we're a B2B software and marketplaces investor. All— everything we do is B2B, so I don't touch anything really that's like directly interacting with consumers. And everywhere, our initial checks are always investing at the seed stage. We certainly do kind of our pro rata and follow-on rounds, but we want to be like one of those initial checks into the business, right? at least institutional checks. We also, we're a lead investor, so we take a very thesis-driven approach to the opportunities that we look at and the deals that we ultimately invest in. And, you know, in addition to investing, we have this acceleration team which works exclusively with our portfolio companies between the seed and Series A stage. And the goal for that team is just helping our companies ultimately generate more revenue more quickly than they otherwise would. So how does that break down in practice? It's really like a large part of it is around go-to-market strategy, pricing negotiations, defining, refining your funnel. Like, we know that the seed Series A stage is about trial and error. We try to help prioritize that list a little bit in terms of what we might try. on the go-to-market side of the house. And also we help with that transition from founder-led sales to building some kind of repeatable model that we can also then hire people. So the second part of our team is like a recruiting people and talent and sort of benefits function. That's also gonna help source candidates for you, screen candidates, talk to you about benchmarking, think through compensation. It can get kind of tricky in the early days when you're thinking about fixed and variable and equity comp. And so it's just a resource there as well. So that's maybe like the highest level on Bowery. We have, I'd say in the last— well, our first marketplace investment was in 2013. We invested in a company called Transfix, which is going through a SPAC process right now. But along the way, we've made quite a few additional B2B marketplace investments. I'm happy to talk to you more about those, but I'll stop there, Mike.