Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in 41 countries and more than 75,000 employees, the firm's clients include corporations, governments, institutions, and individuals. Morgan Stanley ranked No. 61 in the 2021 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.
Venture capital is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. The start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, Sequoia's total assets under management were approximately US$85 billion.
Bain Capital is an American private investment firm based in Boston. It specializes in private equity, venture capital, credit, public equity, impact investing, life sciences, crypto, tech opportunities, partnership opportunities, special situations and real estate. Bain Capital invests across a range of industry sectors and geographic regions. As of 2022, the firm managed approximately $165 billion of investor capital. The firm was founded in 1984 by partners from the consulting firm Bain & Company. The company is headquartered at 200 Clarendon Street in Boston with 22 offices in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Apax Partners LLP is a British private equity firm, headquartered in London, England. The company also operates out of six other offices in New York, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Tel Aviv, Munich and Shanghai. As of December 2017, the firm, including its various predecessors, have raised approximately $65 billion (USD) since 1981. Apax Partners is one of the oldest and largest private equity firms operating on an international basis, ranked the fifteenth largest private equity firm globally.
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.
Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. (TFCP) is a UK-based private equity firm. Financier Guy Hands founded the firm in 2002 through the spin-off of Nomura Principal Finance Group. The firm, which traces its roots to the formation of its predecessor in 1994, has invested over €14 billion since inception.
Doug Richard is an American entrepreneur best known for his television appearances in the United Kingdom. He appeared as a "Dragon" on the first two series of Dragons' Den and was also a government adviser.
Flirtomatic was an online flirting and social networking service for people connected to the Internet via mobile phone or PC. Operated by Handmade Mobile Entertainment, Flirtomatic was named the number one mobile dating site in the U.S. in a study by the mobile measurement company Ground Truth.
AlpInvest Partners is a Dutch-French global private equity asset manager with over $85 billion of committed capital since inception as of December 31, 2022. The firm invests on behalf of more than 450 institutional investors from North America, Asia, Europe, South America and Africa.
Court Square Capital Partners is a private equity firm focused on leveraged buyout transactions. Court Square was originally a captive private equity firm within Citigroup known as Citigroup Venture Capital Equity Partners. Court Square's investment professionals have invested over $4.5 billion in more than 150 transactions, which have returned $14 billion to date.
Private equity in the 2000s represents one of the major growth periods in the history of private equity and venture capital. Within the broader private equity industry, two distinct sub-industries, leveraged buyouts and venture capital expanded along parallel and interrelated tracks.
Kennet Partners is a private equity investment firm that provides growth capital to software, Internet and technology-enabled business services companies in Europe and the US.
Corporate venture capital (CVC) is the investment of corporate funds directly in external startup companies. CVC is defined by the Business Dictionary as the "practice where a large firm takes an equity stake in a small but innovative or specialist firm, to which it may also provide management and marketing expertise; the objective is to gain a specific competitive advantage." Examples of CVCs include GV and Intel Capital.
Robeco Schweiz is an international investment company with a specific focus on sustainability investments. It was founded in 1995 by Reto Ringger. The company is based in Zurich, Switzerland, and considers economic, environmental and social criteria in its investment strategies. In addition to asset management, the company has an indexes and private equity portion of the business. In 2006 RobecoSAM introduced a division called sustainability services that provides sustainability benchmarking reports to companies. In 2001, the then-RobecoSAM became the first carbon neutral company in Switzerland.
Balderton Capital is a venture capital firm based in London, UK, that invests in early-stage, technology and internet startup companies in Europe. It is considered to be among the four-biggest venture capital firms in the English capital.
Fintech, a portmanteau of "financial technology", refers to firms using new technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data are regarded as the "ABCD" of fintech. The use of smartphones for mobile banking, investing, borrowing services, and cryptocurrency are examples of technologies designed to make financial services more accessible to the general public. Fintech companies consist of both startups and established financial institutions and technology companies trying to replace or enhance the usage of financial services provided by existing financial companies.
Douglas Alan Barrowman is a Scottish businessman. He founded the Knox Group of Companies and has invested in Ve Interactive, Aston Ventures, and Equi Capital. He is married to Michelle Mone.
Oxford Sciences Enterprises is an early-stage venture capital firm with over $800M in AUM based in Oxford, UK. It operates in partnership with the University of Oxford, as the university's preferred investor, several prominent financiers back the firm, including Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tencent, Huawei and Invesco. The firm uses academic research from the university's science departments to form commercial businesses, also known as spin-outs.
