GCV Powerlist 2016: Tony Askew, REV Venture Partners

RELX Group has committed to a further fund for REV Venture Partners, formerly known as Reed Elsevier Ventures. The new fund will be managed by REV founder partners Tony Askew and Kevin Brown who are one of the corporate venture industry’s longest serving partner groups having both moved to REV at the end of 2000.

Since then, REV has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in big data, digital health, internet and enterprise technology companies, including being early investors in Palantir, Healthline, Babbel and Netli. Its most recent deal was the $36m round for MemSQL, a US-based real-time analytic database at scale provider.

Askew said: “We ended 2015 in great shape with recent new investments, Recorded Future, CreativeLive and Sentrian performing well as well as some great results in the wider portfolio: Palantir, Babbel and Tigertext raised big rounds at good valuations and Healthline Networks spun off Healthline Media, one of the largest and fastest-growing consumer health information sites in the US, to Summit Partners.

“In early 2016 we closed another significant fund from which we will invest over the next five years and we have completed our first investment, MemSQL, the emerging leader in real-time analytic database, based in San Francisco.

“Our focus on data and analytics is much the same, as is our broad geographic waterfront, US, Europe and Israel. We believe that data and analytics is transforming every industry and we will continue to back exceptional, ambitious entrepreneurs that have the drive to disrupt and build new category leaders.”

For his 2014 Powerlist profile, Askew said: “We found a welcoming home here, as RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier Group) wanted us to create a successful, long-term corporate venturing capability. We designed the fund as a financial VC but with a meaningful strategic angle. The financial focus means we take board seats and our compensation includes carried interest [a share of investment profit], like traditional VCs, which aligns us well with entrepreneurs and other investors. Our strategic angle comes from bringing to bear RELX Group’s superior access to domain knowledge and a highly relevant referral network”.

Askew first became a venture capitalist at SoftBank, a Japan-based internet company, after working as a corporate and an entrepreneur. He said: “Back in the early days of the cauldron of the internet bubble I was persuaded it would be far more interesting to apply what I had learnt in building digital businesses by becoming a VC and so I joined SoftBank.I graduated as a physicist, so I did what all physicists do in the UK and joined a management consultancy.”

Other past activities included running electronic publishing for Random House, which included co-investing in a Los Angeles-based new media company alongside filmmaker Stephen Spielberg. Later at mobile operator Cellnet, now O2, he co-developed and launched the world’s first wireless internet service provider, Genie, which grew quickly to 4 million users across Europe.”
He was the first chairman of the corporate venturing group of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, and now heads the UK trade body’s broader VC committee.