B Capital Group aims for stage-agnostic global tech investing platform

For its first fund, technology investment firm B Capital Group set out to raise $250 million in 12 months. Once that was achieved, the partners “decided to top up the fund, which we did in the past six months,” Co-Founder Raj Ganguly said.

Expecting to add $50 million to $70 million, the firm wound up pooling considerably more, for a final close of $360 million, which the firm announced earlier this month.

According to Ganguly, “the reason for the top-up is not to make additional investments. We wanted additional capital to deploy to companies in the portfolio that we believe are showing real potential and traction.”

Ganguly said the firm intends to raise another fund, but he declined to say exactly when. “The simple answer is, we’re about halfway through the current one, and we’ve been investing it for about a year and a half.” There have been 12 publicly announced investments out of the fund — including Capital Match, Evidation Health and Ninja Van — with others soon to be disclosed.

B Capital Group takes its name from the initials of Boston Consulting Group, which Ganguly called “our sponsoring anchor investor and limited partner.” The fund’s largest investor is Partner and Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin, who co-founded Facebook.

The co-founders met at Harvard University, where Ganguly was studying business and Saverin was an undergrad economics major. Both had moved to the U.S. as children, Ganguly from India and Saverin from Brazil.

“We knew some of the same people, and then he went off to co-found Facebook, and I moved to the West Coast to start working in tech and eventually tech investing,” Ganguly said.

They reconnected five or six years ago, after Saverin started investing in early-stage startups. “We spent nearly a year together talking about institutionalizing his investing,” said Ganguly, who was ready to move on after six years at Bain Capital. They decided there was an opportunity to build a global platform for tech investing, focused on accelerating the path-to-market for B2B companies.

“Almost everyone on the team has come from a background of being operators and business builders,” Ganguly said. “The investment of the capital is when the real work begins.”

In addition, the partnership with BCG offers “access to many of the world’s largest corporations.” B Capital Group can talk to these companies to “understand what their pain points are, what kinds of technologies they’re looking for,” then use that information to screen investment opportunities.

Investments are split between the U.S. and the rest of the world. The firm has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Singapore, where Saverin famously resides (having renounced his U.S. citizenship before Facebook’s IPO).

B Capital Group invests mainly in Series B and C rounds, targeting post-product companies typically with tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

“Over time our goal is to be stage-agnostic,” Ganguly said. “We’ve invested with big growth-equity and sometimes private-equity firms,” for two reasons: increased interest across the spectrum in technology investing and the underdevelopment of venture capital ecosystems outside the U.S.

Action Item: Check out B Capital Group’s Form ADV here.

B Capital Group Co-Founder Raj Ganguly. Photo courtesy of the firm.