Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016: Asher Hochberg

Asher Hochberg, head of corporate development at CircleUp, might come from an investment background, but at CircleUp he is now involved in a very different kind of financial backing.

Hochberg said: “I joined CircleUp in early 2015 after a decade of being an investor in traditional private equity – Goldman Sachs Principal Investment area – and hedge fund – Crestwood Capital Management – disciplines.

“I help lead CircleUp’s major strategic initiatives and was recently promoted to manage the principal activities for our family of funds that invest alongside the marketplace.”

In August, CircleUp said it had raised $22m for its CircleUp Consumer Growth Fund to invest in deals listed on its marketplace.

CircleUp is an online marketplace for emerging consumer product and retail companies to raise capital, with more than 200 brands fundraising and about 500 applying per month, as at November.

That month, General Mills, a US-listed food producer, used its business development and corporate venturing unit, 301 INC, to form a fund using CircleUp’s marketplace exclusively to source, evaluate and invest in emerging consumer product brands, according to Hochberg.

He added: “Everything we do at CircleUp contributes to helping entrepreneurs thrive by providing them with the capital and resources they need to grow their business. As part of this, I helped lead these two landmark deals that were transformative in our industry.”

Ryan Caldbeck,
CEO
of CircleUp, which also raised $33m in November in its series C round to expand its team, said: “Asher is passionate about building something massive and having a huge positive impact on the world.

“Too often in finance, the most talented people are also the most myopic or risk averse. As a result, finance has had very few innovators over the years. Asher has broken that trend. From Harvard University, where he studied economics, to Goldman Sachs to a world class hedge fund in New York City, Asher has been a star at every organisation he has ever joined.”

As to why he was interested in venture, Hochberg, a vegetarian, said: “After spending many years researching and investing in established public and private companies, I realised almost all of the non-tech innovation in the US is occurring at very early-stage companies across all industry verticals, not just tech and software.

“The problem was how to find, evaluate and invest in these private companies since they were not typically located in the tech VC heartlands of San Francisco and New York City. Since non-tech venture investing is largely supported by localised, offline angel groups, there was no easy way to find highly innovative non-tech companies at scale.

“I was introduced to the founders of CircleUp and we shared a strong passion to build a marketplace to help investors find, evaluate and invest in early-stage companies.

“Our biggest challenge is educating entrepreneurs and getting them comfortable with raising equity capital for their company through an online platform.”