The Fund’s six initial investments have CEOs from underrepresented groups of which 50% are women
Washington-based Bison Ventures announced the closing of its inaugural fund that will invest in early-stage frontier technology companies. Bison was co-founded in 2022 by Tom Biegala and Ben Hemani who previously worked at Cascade Asset Management Co., the investment office that manages the assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Gates family members.
Biegala and Hemani joined by Principals Ari Wright and Caleb Appleton —all come from engineering backgrounds and have investment experience. The team will use the $135 million fund to fill a gap that exists for science-based, deep tech companies that have prospects for commercialization.
The team will pursue global challenges such as climate change and the treatment of disease in which innovation offers the potential for massive scale—but have not yet caught the attention of mainstream venture capital.
“Most venture dollars today continue to chase pure software companies. However, it was frontier technologies such as NVIDIA’s GPUs and Ginkgo Bioworks’ microbe engineering platform that enabled today’s revolutions in AI and synthetic biology respectively,” said Founding Partner Hemani.
Together they will apply their years of experience of working with entrepreneurs who have started and scaled companies in synthetic biology, computational drug discovery, semiconductors, climate tech, and robotics.
“With diversified engineering backgrounds, we are not afraid to deal in the physical and biological world. We know that the best solutions derive from technology integration from different industries and applications, and we are comfortable backing bold companies early on in their lifecycle when technical risk still exists,” continued Hemani.
While the co-founders stress the value of having a tight team of engineers working together, the fund has invested in a diverse group of entrepreneurs and CEOs. Bison’s six initial investments were made across multiple fields, including climate and sustainability, precision agriculture, behavioral health, generative AI, and computational drug discovery. Bison touts that over 80% of the CEOs they have backed so far come from groups that are under-represented in venture-backed companies and half are women.
“But there are thorny challenges ahead, and to address them, we’re not interested in incrementalism. We believe that backing 10x, step-change innovations at an early stage is the only way to build successful frontier tech companies, which is exactly what we founded Bison to do,” summed up Founding Partner Biegala.
