BNVT Capital, a global venture firm based in London, has launched its debut fund, which is targeting $150 million to invest in artificial intelligence-first and technology-driven companies solving pressing societal challenges. The firm also has offices in New York and Riyadh.
BNVT is seeded by Sackville Capital, a global investment firm based in London. Sackville has a strategic focus on building partnerships with new and emerging investment firms, providing strategic and operational expertise alongside a strong network of international partners to create value. The firm declined to name other LPs.
The fund plans to invest in 25 to 30 companies globally over the next two years, with checks between $2 million and $7 million. The categories it is most interested in funding are resource efficiency, financial access and knowledge access and security.
Among the 11 companies across Europe and the US that it has already invested in are Swap Commerce (UK), Cloover (Germany) and Dawnguard (Netherlands), co-investing with global firms such as TPG, Iconiq, Lowercarbon and QED.
Swap operates a product return platform designed for automation, shipping and returns through instant exchange technology. Cloover’s software platform connects people to renewable energy and provides a plug-and-play system for sustainable home improvement companies to offer embedded financing services, simplifying sales processes and resulting in higher customer value. Dawnguard’s cloud security architecture platform aims to integrate infrastructure validation into the early stages of system design.
BNVT was founded in 2023 by managing partners Rory Mounsey-Heysham and Chris Corbishley and general partner Nasir Alsharif. Mounsey-Heysham previously worked as a venture capital investor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and as an associate at Spark Venture Capital.
Prior to BNVT, Corbishley served as a principal at Hedosophia, a London VC firm, and as an investor at Forward Partners, which was acquired by Molten Ventures. Alsharif has been executive chairman at Sackville Capital since April 2023 and served as managing director and CEO at the firm for nearly four years before that, with additional experience as head of private wealth and institutional asset management at Goldman Sachs and as senior principal at Investcorp Bank, both in Riyadh.
BNVT’s investment approach is based on a research study, “Benevolent Disruption: The Fortune in Solving the World’s Biggest Problems,” which the firm co-authored with Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School and academics at MIT, Oxford University and Georgetown University, among others, and using data provided by global allocator VenCap International.
Drawing from proprietary data on more than 500 VC funds and 14,000 companies over the last 40 years, the study showed that only 30 percent of venture-backed companies tackle big societal problems, but that these companies have historically delivered 51 percent higher returns than their peers.
“LPs and entrepreneurs are crying out for investors who see the world’s biggest challenges not as a moral quandary, but as vast untapped markets,” Mounsey-Heysham said in a statement. “A big problem is simply a big market waiting to be served.”
Alsharif said he is “hugely excited by the opportunity set that BNVT Capital has identified. This is truly a differentiated investment thesis – backed up by extraordinarily real-world data. The countercyclical nature of the thesis – creating outsized returns from solving the biggest problems – is applicable across multiple sectors, and is particularly exciting.”
BNVT’s fund originated with Mounsey-Heysham seeing outsized returns that Bill Gates was generating from investing in solutions to global problems, bolstered by Corbishley noticing a similar pattern in his own portfolio at Hedosophia. At a time when politicians and the investor community are debating a business’s role in society. BNVT sees its thesis as a third way between the ESG thesis and unfettered capitalism.
In tandem with the fund, BNVT said it is also launching the Benevolent Disruption platform and community, which seeks to combine data analysis, an academic literature review and a list of allocators such as Starwood Capital and TPG Rise Fund, along with tips for how to identify benevolent disruptors.
