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Students launch venture fund for campus-related startups

Arrow Capital will provide early funding to new companies that are connected to someone who currently has or previously had a UC Berkeley affiliation

By Kim Girard

Arrow Capital’s student-run team (left to right): investment partners Ben Adler, a law student; Levi Walsh, an undergraduate in computer science and mathematics; Kaitlyn Uythoven and Niles Chang, undergraduates; Amy Guo, an undergraduate in Management, Entrepreneurship and Technology; and managing partner Matthew Bond, an MBA student.

November 7, 2018

A new student-led venture fund led by UC Berkeley students, Arrow Capital, has launched to help shepherd more early-stage investments in startups related to UC Berkeley.

Arrow has an influential parent fund in Bow Capital. In 2015, the University of California partnered with Vivek Ranadivé to create Bow, a venture capital fund that would invest in research and technology developed by UC students and faculty. (UC’s Office of the Chief Investment Officer is an anchor investor,) Ranadivé, the founder of the software company TIBCO and the current owner of the Sacramento Kings, was asked to lead the fund.

Matthew Bond, an MBA student who started his first company at age 16 and studied math at Oxford University as an undergraduate, connected with Bow Capital during his first year at Berkeley Haas, when he served as a Berkeley Haas Venture Fellow. Asked by Bow to come up with new ideas for investing in UC Berkeley startups, Bond proposed a fund that would concentrate on smaller, pre-seed-round deals, providing additional deal flow to Bow — which typically makes seed and Series A deals across the UC-affiliated system and beyond.

Bow approved the idea and Arrow Capital was born. It’s managed by Bond and five UC Berkeley students who serve as investment partners.

Applications for startups are already pouring in, and Arrow began reviewing them this week.