This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. All right, always looking for a little more security in the real world, in the cyber world, which is increasingly important, especially I think as we talk about elections, it being a presidential election year, and we want to understand where the money is going. And we got the perfect guy to talk to talk about that,
and that is Alberto Jepez. He is the co founder and managing director of Forge Point Capital, joining us on the phone from San Francisco. Got a new fund all about cybersecurity. Alberto, thanks for joining us, Thank you for the opportunity. Good to be here. So tell us about this fund. What gave you the idea and the impetus to get it off the ground. Well, this is our
second fund. We started um with our UH Focus Fund in cyber security in seventeen when we raise our first fund, which was three million, and we invested in seventeen companies. And since the first fund, the industry is almost double in size and in importance. And now we raise a fund that is UH millions or we have about seven fifty million under management, which puts us to be the largest cybersecurity venture fund in the in the market and
the need, the importance. You got it. It's not only for governments, individuals and businesses because cybersecurity has to be embedded in everything we do. Yeah, no doubt. You know, Jason, I were saying, excuse me, Alberta before we got going, is how often we have you know, a CEO or an executive coming on with a new cyber security startup fund or not a start up fund, but another company like that is where folks are spending their money. And
there's a lot of companies out there. So give us an idea because I do feel like there's so many offerings. What will guide your investments? You know, unlike many of our other venture funds, were exclusively focused on on cybersecurity, which gives us tremendous insights in the industry. In the level of experience that we have in the team, about seven investment professionals has spent their lives in cybersecurity as entrepreneurs,
investors and corporate executives. So that insight gives us an opportunity to be close to what we call our advisory council, where we have about sixty very active uh cybersecurity professionals that really gives us insights about what are the problems they're trying to solve. These are many c i o's chief security officers, chief trust officers from the largest businesses
that gives us the insight or what's needed. We work with also their entrepreneurs that help us that the solutions and also with board members or industry leaders that can help us make the right selections. So giving that insight and giving that group that we actually call our Cybersecurity Advisory Council, we get insights about which areas that we invest,
so which areas are people talking about about cybersecurity. So you you know, the biggest issues that we have is the number and sophistication or cyber attacks is only increasing. We have new technologies that need to be protected in addition, we have a huge shortage of cybersecurity professionals. As such, then we need to figure out on ways we can automate. We can use machine learning and other technologies to be able to help address the biggest issues that we have.
And so Alberto tell us about the investors, the type of folks who are putting money UH into your fund, because we certainly have seen a lot of as Carol said, a lot of interest on the institutional and the and the sort of high net worth individual side and trying to get invested in this area. Talk to us about the fundraising environment. This environment is looking for specialized funds.
You know, the generalist fund is interesting to them, but they're looking for people that really focus on the in the in the area, and so it's fourth point for them. They like the fact that we were very focused on cybersecurity and our track record. So the people are invested in the fund. Our corporate UH corporations, UM, we have ancient plans, we have endowments, we have high network individuals
and family offices. So they're all coming together and and and they're very interested in not only that, the actually investments that we do, and they're often benefit from the insights we provide to them and their corporations and their businesses. So I do think about our audience who's listening, because you know, we've talked a lot about private versus public markets, and I think investors are increasingly interested in funds like yours. You know, UM, a lot of you know, more of
the private markets that's going on. So in terms of are you expecting there's going to be more fun similar to this. That's kind of a narrow vertical UM, and you know, what are your expectations that. So we thought the same thing that it was a narrow verth vertical. It's not a narrow vertical. It's really a broad vertical because everything we do and digital transformation and communications, IoT intelligence and so and so, it's abroad this broad applicability.
But it's a very focused fun so UM. Some of the things that investors are telling us is they like the fact that we can create alpha. We usually identify the early innovators. Companies are trying to use new ways
of addressing problems. For instance, we just made it. We just announced and an investment in a company called Sizsive, which was in a spin out of trend Micro, where they're trying to deliver a security operations center in the cloud because people are trying to manage Amazon, uh, Microsoft and all the different clouds providers. They are providing that so that they don't have to deal with all the people in all the expenses to be able to deal
with that. So we are addressing some of the core issues that the industry is trying to deal with and more importantly, we're trying to create alpha. What happens is there's two dynamics in the market. Private investors are interesting because most of the exits in the in in in cyber security are acquisitions. More than ninety percent of companies get acquired, and all for get acquired by established companies.
They're not growing as fast and no longer innovating, but they go and buy a fast growing We court technology in deeperd fertises to be able to increase the radio growth. So define we create alpha. But at the same time we have an opportunity we always invest with basically the opportunity to take the company public, but more often than not they get acquired that they get approached before going to that they're public offering. All right, we're gonna leave
it there. Alberta Jepez he is the co founder and managing director of forged Point Capital. They've got a new fund, their seconds UH. It is the largest of its kind. The new pool of money about seven fifty million under management in total. Really interesting. Well in AI and a cybersecurity, there's a lot of themes that they're looking at to make their potential investments.