Essex Gate Ventures is the family office for Sarah and Reid French of Atlanta, GA. The organization was founded in 2019 to manage the investments of the family as well as to give to charitable causes through the French Family Foundation.
Summary
The investment arm of Essex Gate Ventures primarily focuses on technology investments, with a particular investment theme of B2B cloud software businesses. The family office invests in this sector through direct private investments, private equity, and public equity.
Why the focus on technology?
Technology continues to alter the human experience and at a faster rate of change than ever before. As a result, it offers significant business opportunities for revenue growth and equity value creation. Cloud software businesses offer the advantage of being subscription based, leading to a high degree of recurring revenues and more predictable returns. Artificial intelligence promises additional productivity & discovery at fast rates of change.
Role of Reid French
Reid French, the managing director of Essex Gate Ventures, spent the majority of his career as an operator of enterprise & cloud-based software companies. This culminated in his 8 years as CEO of Applied Systems, the leader in insurance cloud software. Applied Systems is owned by private equity firms Hellman & Friedman, JMI Equity, StonePoint Capital, and Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL).
Today, French serves on the Board of Directors of two public software companies, design software leader Autodesk (Nasdaq: ADSK) and customer engagement software company Verint (Nasdaq: VRNT).
French also serves on the Board of Directors of two private equity backed companies. He serves on the board of legal content & productivity platform leader NetDocuments, which is owned by private equity firms Warburg Pincus and Cove Hill Partners. He also serves on the Board of Directors of JSSI, the leading independent provider of maintenance support, advisory services, software, and financial tools to the business aviation industry, whcih is owned by private equity firms GTCR and Genstar.
French also sits on the executive advisory boards of Cove Hill Partners, a private equity firm based in Boston, and Noro-Moseley Partners, a growth equity firm based in Atlanta.
More information on this portfolio and these firms can be found below.
