Potential Investor

Bonin Bough is one of the foremost-awarded marketing executives in his field, the host of The Cleveland Hustles, and the author of Txt Me. Throughout his illustrious career as one of the youngest C-suite executives in a Fortune 50 company, Bonin has spearheaded some of the industry’s largest global marketing campaigns across digital, mobile, television, print, and experiential, including the premier of the first ever 3D printed food product, the customizable, real-time 3D printed Oreo at SXSW.

As the Chief Media & eCommerce Officer at Mondelēz International (formerly Kraft Foods), he created some of the first marketing programs across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Paramount Films, ABC, NBC, Fox, to name a few, and took precedence in fostering partnerships with startups including Instagram, Foursquare, and Buzzfeed. Prior to Mondelēz International, Bonin led digital marketing globally for PepsiCo, Weber Shandwick and Ruder Finn Interactive.

Potential Investor

Charlie Hanna is an investor at Marcy Venture Partners (MVP) in San Francisco, an early-stage venture capital firm co-founded by Larry Marcus, Jay Brown and Jay-Z.

Charlie’s focus is consumer products and services with an emphasis on sustainability, accessibility and culture. Prior to MVP, Charlie was an Associate at SWAT Equity Partners, a NYC-based venture capital firm investing in emerging consumer startup brands. Previously, Charlie worked at William Morris Endeavor (Personal Appearances) and Paradigm Talent Agency (Brand Partnerships) in Los Angeles.

Potential Investor

Laura and John established the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in 2010. They believe philanthropy should be transformational and should seek through innovation to solve persistent problems in society. As co-founders, Laura and John actively engage in the organization’s overall direction and daily execution. Laura is an attorney and a former oil company executive. John is an investor.

Arnold Ventures is a philanthropy dedicated to tackling some of the most pressing problems in the United States. They invest in sustainable change, building it from the ground up based on research, deep thinking, and a strong foundation of evidence. They drive public conversation, craft policy, and inspire action through education and advocacy.

They are a team of more than 90 subject-matter experts headquartered in Houston with offices in New York and Washington, D.C. We work in four key issue areas: Criminal Justice, Education, Health, and Public Finance. Our work is guided by Evidence-Based Policy, Research, and Advocacy.

Potential Investor

Lo is the Founding Managing Partner of Plexo Capital, which he incubated and spun out from Google Investments, based on a strategy to increase access to early stage deal flow.

Potential Investor

Drive Capital filed paperwork with the SEC indicating it had successfully closed $350 million for its third flagship venture capital fund.

The fund’s assets are split between two entities: Drive Capital Fund III, L.P. (holding $249.425 million raised from 61 investors) and Drive Capital Fund III (TE), L.P. (holding $100.575 million from 22 investors).

According to the filings, Drive Capital received its first concrete capital commitment for Fund III on April 5, 2019. It’s the firm’s largest investment vehicle yet. Drive Capital closed $300 million for Fund II in 2016 and $250 million for its inaugural fund in 2014.

Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Drive Capital is among the largest Midwestern venture investors by assets under management. Like most VCs firms, Drive Capital tends to invest relatively close to home. According to Crunchbase data, over half of its portfolio companies are headquartered in either Ohio, Illinois, or Michigan.

Drive Capital has invested in the likes of Root Insurance (which Crunchbase News has covered in the past), Duolingo, and Udacity, among others. Its exits include HR tech solution Gild (acquired by Chicago hedge fund Citadel), retail intelligence toolkit Channel IQ (bought by Market Track), restaurant front desk platform Nowait (acquired by Yelp for $40 million), and travel planning app Roadtrippers (which Togo Group bought in 2018).

Drive Capital makes the majority of its first investments at Series A and Series B, and the firm invests in latter-stage rounds as well. To this end, Drive is also in the midst of raising capital for its first opportunity fund to bolster its follow-on and opportunistic late-stage investments.

The firm filed amended paperwork for Drive Capital Overdrive Fund I, L.P. and Drive Capital Overdrive Fund I (TE), L.P., alongside the updates to entities representing its flagship Fund III. For the Overdrive Fund, Drive Capital is targeting a total of $400 million, of which roughly $284.4 million has already been raised. Since Drive Capital made its initial filings for the Overdrive Fund back in April, the firm had raised an additional $33.5 million for that particular investment vehicle.

Alone, each of Drive Capital’s new funds are among the largest capital pools drawn in the previous year by Midwestern venture capital firms so far in 2019, according to Crunchbase data. At the end of last month, Chicago-based ARCH Venture Partners closed more than $635 million for its tenth flagship fund, which was oversubscribed from the initial $600 million target Crunchbase News broke in October 2018. Winslow Capital, a growth-stage firm based in Minneapolis, is targeting $400 million of its second fund, according to paperwork filed last month.

This being said, Drive Capital is one of the most-funded Midwestern investors focused on early-stage deals operating in the market today.