Redwood & inVentures merge

TMT-focused executive search firm Redwood Partners and European TMT early and expansion stage investor inVentures are to merge. This will result in the creation of a pan-Atlantic firm focused on providing executive search, strategic consulting and investment and merchant banking products and services to TMT companies. The investment and merchant banking products will come from inVentures, which has in its two years of operation styled itself as a development company as well as a VC investor. The merged entity is known as Redwood Partners International.

Redwood Partners International also plans to raise a new venture fund of up to $100 million by early 2002, in collaboration with several leading TMT corporations. According to Greg Bedrosian the LPs for this fund will be ones with the ability to co-invest as well as help vet opportunities and assist investee companies.

Tom McPartland, former CEO of TCI Music, joins Redwood Partners International as executive chairman. The chief executive’s job is shared between Michael Flannery, co-founder and CEO of Redwood Partners and Greg Bedrosian, co-founder and CEO of inVentures. Bedrosian said: “Through our strategic investment and merchant banking activities, we have seen a growing need for executive search capabilities to complement our services. With our merger with Redwood we will expand both our geographic presence and provide the senior decision-makers within our clients with a combination of quality management and seamless access to investment and merchant banking services.”

McPartland, Bedrosian and Flannery are joined on Redwood Partners International’s board by: Boris Jordan, CEO of Russia-based NTV and President and CEO of The Sputnik Group, a private equity and advisory firm (vice chairman); Bob Buziak, founder and chief executive of the independent consulting firm Buziak & Company LLC; Genna Lozovsky, chief investment officer of inVentures (chief strategy officer); and Randy Schoenfeld, co-founder and managing partner of Redwood Partners (managing partner).

Redwood Partners International has also set up an advisory board consisting of Louis D’Ambrosio, who is also vice president, worldwide sales and marketing, Software Group of IBM; Andrei Bogolubov, who is also senior vice president and chief European communications Officer, AOL; and Tommy Lovstad, who is also vice president, M-Horizon Telenor Mobile.

Operating from headquarters in New York and London and offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, Stockholm, and San Francisco, Redwood Partners International has more than 45 professionals serving clients and investors worldwide.