We often think that startup investment is for venture capitalists, angel investors, family offices or venture funds.
It is interesting to see that celebrities too invest in start-up ventures to diversify their portfolios from movie production and traditional long-term investments. They have also set up their own venture capital firms.
This nice short snapshot from CB Insights highlights the 13 most active celebrity investors as of last week. Some of the most active investors have 20 to 70 startups in their portfolio, including the usual suspects - Airbnb, Box, Uber and Foursquare.
What about the ventures receiving the investments?
It seems that Splice, Casper and BioBeats are the three most sought after ventures.
Some of the ventures in the portfolios have already been acquired by Yahoo, Facebook and Google.
Does this give us a hint on those key trends larger companies must watch out?
Reviewing the overall investment portfolio it seems that wearable-enabled digital solutions, end-user social sharing and gamification platforms, AI and IoT combined offerings, products designed using great engineering, crowd sourced feedback and design thinking techniques, were all in the mix.
Maybe more traditional mature enterprises could learn from these risk-taking celebrities and invest in those Unicorns that can help transform their product offerings, business models and customer propositions.
Celebrities know that to make the most out of their investments, they should diversify their portfolios, and it looks like they’re setting their eyes on tech and venture capital. While some celebrities are making investments as angels betting on very early-stage companies, others have formed actual venture funds, which have LPs or limited partners (i.e., pension funds and other large institutional investors as funders). We put together a list of the most active celebrity investors using CB Insights’ data, and ranked them against one another.
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