Luminari Capital, a new investment fund focused on digital media and video, is raising $40 million and has already pulled in some money from BSkyB, the satellite TV giant.
Digital Video Fund Luminari Is Raising $40 Million, Has Signed on BSkyB
Roku board member Daniel Leff starts his own fund.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Luminari is run by Daniel Leff, formerly a partner at Globespan Capital Partners. BSkyB’s investment in the fund was disclosed last year, but Luminari hadn’t said anything publicly about its fundraising ambitions until it filed with the SEC last week. A person familiar with the fund’s operation said it closed the first part of its investment round this week.
Leff declined to comment about Luminari, but he has been making the rounds among big media companies and other potential investors for some time. His LinkedIn page describes his thesis: “Luminari Capital is a new digital media fund with an emphasis on the innovation and disruption happening globally throughout the $500B+ TV/video ecosystem. The firm’s investment thesis is based on mapping key technology themes (cloud computing, big data, SaaS, social, & mobile) to the fundamental transformations happening in content creation, distribution, and consumption.”
This isn’t Leff’s first linkup with BSkyB. He is on the board of Roku, the Web TV box and software maker, which has received investment dollars from BSkyB, as well as Globespan.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
