Kevin Zhang
Partner at Bain Capital Ventures
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Partner
2020 - Current
Bain Capital Ventures partners with founders to accelerate their development and impact. We invest from seed to growth in software, infrastructure, financial services and healthcare. Non-Board Investments // BCV Lead: Finley (Seed), Aqueduct (Seed, acq. by Stripe), Command E (Seed, acq. by Dropbox) BCV Coinvest: Tandem Health (Seed), Lithos Carbon (Seed), Feathery (Seed), Vesta (Seed), Shelf Engine (Seed) BC Crypto: Sense Finance (Seed), Variational Research (Seed), Lumina (Seed, acq. by BitGo)
Principal
2018 - 2020
Investor
2016 - 2018
Bain Capital Ventures invests in seed to growth-stage startups that uses tech to disrupt existing markets or create entirely new ones.
Lead Seed Investor & Board Observer
2021
Mintlify is the modern standard for public-facing technical documentation. Beautiful out of the box, easy to maintain, and optimized for user engagement. Mintlify was founded by Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee. We met Han when he was still at Cornell, and had already built two startups: one acquired, the other about cows (ask him about it). Our greatest contribution to Mintlify might've been hiring Han, which immediately convinced him that he didn't want to be a VC.
Mintlify helps developers build beautiful public-facing documentation that converts users.
Raised $21,700,000.00 from Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator and Bain Capital.
Series B Investor & Board Member
2024
Loyal is developing the first-ever drugs intended to extend the healthspan and lifespan of dogs. Cellular Longevity was founded by Celine Halioua. We met Celine thanks to her former chief of staff, who is a member of our community of rising stars in Silicon Valley. At our events, people wouldn't stop asking him about when their dog could live forever.
Loyal is a biotechnology company developing medicines to extend dogs lifespan and maintain their quality of life.
Raised $115,000,000.00 from BoxGroup, First Round Capital, Valor Equity Partners, The Todd & Rahul Angel Fund, Khosla Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Quiet Capital and Bain Capital Ventures.
Seed/Series A Investor & Board Member
2022
Pallet is a company dedicated to disrupting the logistics industry, providing end-to-end logistics visibility, control, and optimization. Pallet was founded by Sushanth Raman and Andrew Spencer. Rak Garg and I have each gotten to know Sushanth over half a decade or more before he started Pallet, in my case through our work supporting technology and entrepreneurship in the Columbia community.
Seed/Series A Investor & Board Member
2021
Relay is banking designed for growing businesses. Easily collaborate with your team, manage payments and issue corporate cards, all from your bank. Relay was founded by Yoseph West and Paul Klicnik. When she was President of Xero, our partner Keri Gohman had acquired Hubdoc, where Yoseph was a crucial early team member.
Series A/B Investor & Board Observer
2020
Hightouch is the leading Composable CDP that empowers companies to activate their data warehouse to power personalized marketing and business operations. Hightouch was founded by Kashish Gupta, Tejas Manohar, and Josh Curl. We met them shortly after they pivoted from being a travel agency. For diligence, we simultaneously introduced them and two competitors to several potential customers; Hightouch closed those accounts before their competition even responded to our email.
Hightouch is a data platform that helps sync customers' data from the data warehouse to CRM, marketing, and support tools.
Raised $92,200,000.00 from Databricks Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Amplify Partners, Y Combinator, The New Normal Fund, Bain Capital Ventures, Afore Capital, Barr Moses and Alex Pall.
Founding Investor & Board Observer
2022
Skip helps sovereign blockchain protocols supercharge their user experience, interoperability, and value capture with its vertically integrated product suite. Skip was founded by Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck. We originally met Barry because he was helping spin out a company from D.E. Shaw; I was hoping we could hire him to run incubations at BCV, but he and Mag found an exciting opportunity in blockchain infrastructure instead.
Skip is a infrastructure to enable blockchains to harness MEV to achieve financial sustainability and power better user experiences.
Raised $6,500,000.00 from IEX Group, Robot Ventures, Jake Hartnell, Zaki Manian, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Galaxy Venture Capital, Nick White, Bain Capital Crypto, Faction and Informal Systems.
Series A Investor & Board Member
2021
Organize, share, and collaborate on creative files and projects with your team. Playbook was founded by Jessica Ko and Alex Zirbel. We'd heard great things about them from friends at Opendoor over the years, and while I didn't see what they saw at seed, we thankfully came around to the opportunity at the Series A.
Playbook develops a visual cloud storage platform to streamline and maintain control of creative assets.
Raised $22,000,000.00 from Bain Capital Ventures, Blank Ventures, Founders Fund, Elad Gil, Maple VC, Hyphen Capital and Abstract Ventures.
Seed/Series A Investor & Board Member
2021
APIs to easily give your users personalized, secure & powerful income tax product experiences. Column Tax was founded by Gavin Nachbar and Michael Bock. My partner Leslie Crowe had run a program for rising stars at Dropbox, of which Gavin was an inaugural member; we reconnected when Gavin and Michael graduated from the first class of South Park Commons fellows.
Column Tax is a platform enabling mobile banks and Fintech companies to offer top tier tax features to their end users.
Raised $26,800,000.00 from Core Innovation Capital, Felicis, Not Boring, Bain Capital Ventures and South Park Commons.
Lead Seed Investor & Board Observer
2020
Alloy Automation is a SaaS integration development platform. Alloy was founded by Sara Du and Gregg Mojica. We met Sara when she launched a prototype data integration tool on Product Hunt in 2019, kept in touch as they iterated through YC, before leading their seed financing the following year.
Alloy is a platform for building and managing SaaS integrations
Raised $25,000,000.00 from Hawke Ventures, FirstMark, Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, Boon Fund and Mu Ventures.