12.15.21

Introducing BVP Forge

Launching our new growth buyout platform and welcoming Rob Arditi as Founding Partner

Bessemer Venture Partners was inspired by early innovations in steel that helped forge modern manufacturing and construction processes. Over the years, we have continuously honored that heritage by pursuing new and innovative opportunities that shape the businesses and technologies of the future.

Until now, that pursuit has largely taken shape via our traditional early- and growth-stage venture capital investments. Yet, over the years, we’ve come across thousands of compelling technology businesses that don’t quite fit this investment model due to their growth trajectory, stage, or structure. We’ve experienced this firsthand with a number of our own portfolio companies that fit more naturally with a growth buyout investment structure, such as Anaqua, NetSmart, TeamViewer, LiveAuctioneers, and companies like Mindbody and Pipedrive that eventually exited to growth buyout firms.

To bridge this gap and expand our flexibility to support a wider range of companies, we’re launching BVP Forge, a new growth buyout platform focused on control and significant minority transactions in software, tech-enabled services, and Internet companies, globally. This new extension of Bessemer enables us to invest in and support these companies and management teams with a dedicated platform and systematic value creation process, while leveraging the unique network, operating resources, and significant scale that Bessemer offers portfolio companies.

In tandem, we’re excited to welcome Rob Arditi into our partnership to lead BVP Forge. Rob joins us from Norwest, where he was co-head of its growth equity business and spent more than 12 years helping build the firm’s growth equity team. We are confident that Rob is the ideal person to lead this exciting new endeavor here at Bessemer.

At Bessemer, Rob will focus on building out BVP Forge to bring our strong existing platform, which includes a network of category-defining companies, to a new set of innovators and leaders, focused on growth-oriented, capital efficient businesses. We have long been a believer in our roadmap-driven approach, which allows us to take a deep look at industries to identify emerging areas, non-obvious industry crosscurrents, and understand the complexities behind sectors. We believe this combination of experience and unwavering focus position us well to support founders and management teams as they scale self-sustaining software, tech-enabled services, and Internet businesses.

We’re excited to push the boundaries of our vision even further with the additions of Rob and BVP Forge. To the revolutionaries we know and those we have yet to meet, forge ahead.