Successful IPO Underscores BGV’s Value Creation Capabilities from Early Stage to IPO
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Palo Alto, CA — March 9, 2020 — BGV, an early-stage venture capital firm with deep Silicon Valley roots and an exclusive focus on global enterprise 4.0 startups, today announced the IPO of portfolio company Grid Dynamics (Nasdaq: GDYN).
“We’re excited to announce the IPO of Grid Dynamics,” said Eric Benhamou, founder and general partner at BGV. “As businesses struggle to keep up with the latest innovations in AI, personalization and search, Grid Dynamics architects and delivers digital transformation programs that level the playing field for their clients. BGV focuses on digital disruption in the enterprise technology space, and Grid Dynamics provides its clients the engineering services required to ride this wave.”
“We’ve seen several successive waves of enterprise technology disruption in Silicon Valley, and now a fourth wave is afoot: Enterprise 4.0,” explains Benhamou. “We’re seeing a shift from digitization to automation. As a new generation of companies emerges to re-write the playbook of digital transformation, entrepreneurs and investors need to know where the old rules still apply, and where they do not. This is our sweet spot at BGV.”
Benhamou also touted BGV’s cross-border model in sourcing the Grid Dynamics team early on, and in nurturing the business towards this milestone. “Our cross-border investment strategy allows BGV to actively work with CEOs to build value in the companies they create and provide the necessary capital to scale globally. BGV’s immigrant origins have enabled us to relate to and connect with the challenges of being an immigrant founder. Headquartered in California with significant engineering presence in Eastern and Central Europe, Grid Dynamics is a prime example of BGV’s cross-border approach to source the most promising capital efficient startups originating in innovation hubs outside the Valley and help them scale here.”
BGV has built a geographically broad team with deep enterprise company building experience who take an active and unique approach to growth — assisting portfolio companies to validate their technologies and scale their businesses globally. BGV’s team has over 300 years of combined business building experience, investing in global enterprise-focused businesses anchored in Silicon Valley and sourced from their global networks in the U.S., Israel, India and Western Europe.
Bringing Grid Dynamics to NASDAQ
Grid Dynamics grew from an early BGV II fund investment to become a leader in driving enterprise-level digital transformation for Fortune 1000 companies. The company has a highly experienced and cohesive management team led by Leonard Livschitz (CEO), coupled with strong technical expertise in the rapidly growing fields of artificial intelligence (AI), data science and cloud computing.
“By taking an approach to investing in and building enterprise value from the earliest stages of a startup, BGV is able to help companies like Grid Dynamics grow in scale and maturity to the point of becoming publicly listed on a major exchange. Over the past five years, the BGV team and I have worked closely with Grid Dynamics to organically scale the company and guide its acquisition by ASL in 2016. We stayed closely involved with the management team as they joined their parent company, ASL, and made an additional investment to fund continued organic and inorganic growth to bolster Grid Dynamics and help the company to scale its business. With an IPO scale business, we then worked with management to prepare the company for its IPO through a SPAC process in 2020,” said Benhamou.
Mr. Leonard Livschitz stated, “This is a tremendous milestone for Grid Dynamics and a testament to the hard work and dedication of our global team. We would especially like to thank BGV for their partnership and many contributions to our success. We are excited to move forward together with our new board of directors and investors as we continue to execute on Grid Dynamics’ growth plan as a public company. With Grid Dynamics’ strong foundation in digital transformation and vision for growth, we see significant opportunities for long-term value creation.”
Grid Dynamics entered into a definitive merger agreement with ChaSerg, a special purpose acquisition vehicle (SPAC), to become a publicly listed company on NASDAQ on November 15, 2019 and completed the IPO process on March 5th, 2020. The company’s equity market capitalization was approximately $600 million based on a stock price of $12.00 per share, 20% above its initial IPO price.
