Aristos: Greek for ‘best’, designates the hero's great epic moments that demonstrate his being aristos.
Strategy
Aristos Ventures focuses on information technology related sectors, including mobile enrichment, Web-based applications/information services, security, and SaaS/PaaS/cloud infrastructure. These sectors are expected to generate substantial growth as the desktop internet economy inevitably goes mobile, providing a powerful inflection point for technology infrastructure built over 30 years. The key features of the investment strategy are:
Aristos Ventures’ venture capital investment strategy represents a return to classic venture capital investing. The firm is geographically agnostic, but focuses on the technology centers of Texas in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.
- Capital Efficiency: The startup value equation has changed. Technology companies are far more efficient than before, given a trend toward using service providers to virtualize their needs, which has resulted in costs that would previously have been treated as capitalized expenditures now being treated as operational expenses. Low cost, online resources allow businesses to spend far less on product development, distribution, and monetization than just a few years ago.
- Risk Compensation: The value created in the early stage round is being rewarded again as companies launch products, gain traction, and prove micro-level metrics.
- Exits: Aristos Ventures targets investment sizes ranging from $750,000 to $1 million (“$1 million to profitability”) over the course of one to several rounds and resulting in a meaningful ownership percentage. Target investments will be those capable of producing exits in the $5 to $20+ million range.
- Incentive Alignment: Aristos’ fund sizes and strategy will provide strong alignment between the interests of the firm and entrepreneur, as well as between Aristos Ventures and its Limited Partners. The general partners are motivated not by management fees, but in building companies.
Aristos Ventures’ venture capital investment strategy represents a return to classic venture capital investing. The firm is geographically agnostic, but focuses on the technology centers of Texas in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.