Bloomberg Beta is an early stage venture capital firm with $150M under management, capitalized solely by Bloomberg. The fund exists to expand Bloomberg’s horizons by investing in companies that make business work better, with a focus on machine intelligence.

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.

Bloomberg Beta has an unconventional investing model where anyone on the team can say yes to a deal. The investing partnership has an equal female-to-male ratio.

Read our full internal operating manual here: https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Manual

We are flexible as to whether our investment is structured as a SAFE, convertible note (debt), or equity — though we believe the valuation cap is the price, because almost every conversion of a SAFE or note we’ve seen in a successful company has happened at or above the valuation cap. We share our form documents in public here.

No, not every VC wants to own 30% of your company. In fact, we think at seed stages too much ownership by the early investors can ruin the cap table — making it difficult for the founders to make money, or later investors to own enough of the company when the company needs bigger dollars to scale.

We believe in transparency. If a startup that takes our money wants to publicize the terms of our investment, we’d generally support that. (Of course we’d never disclose anything confidential without consent, and we expect the same of our founders.)

The average pre-money valuation of our recent investments was $7M, though the range was wide depending on the company’s state (with valuations ranging from $2-15M. (We update this number from time to time, at a pace that avoids inadvertently disclosing the terms of any one deal. This average includes only investments where we were the first money into a company — we lack a way to make our small number of later-stage investments comparable.)